1 in the new Official World Golf Rankings. Langer would take Christine and then her descendants all over the world, winning more than a dozen times, playing in three Ryder Cups and, in 1986, becoming the first player to be ranked No. Hard to find a more dynamic pairing in golf through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dave Woodīernhard Langer and Wood Brothers Golf. Langer’s bag, featuring “Christine,” at the 1993 Masters. That’s how that relationship began with Wood Brothers.” And that was kind of the beginning of that. “Bernhard took it right there,” Wood said. He had made clubs for some of the up-and-coming players on Tour for a few years, but bagging a current major champion would be a coup for his growing outfit. (Think prehistoric Trackman.) Wood stood a few feet back and smiled, as Langer drilled ball after ball perfectly. His caddie, Peter Coleman, stood at the other end of the range at Riviera, signaling with his arms which way the ball would move. Langer took her, teed it up and began swinging away. I was always interested in performance, but these didn’t just perform well, they looked good, too.” “It seemed solid, it would go a good distance when I hit it. “It had a nice pear shape,” Langer recalled the other day. As he tested a few different models on the range, Langer liked some of them, but the connection wasn’t quite there. Among them, was a potential new client: a 28-year-old mild-mannered German, who was the reigning Masters champion.īernhard Langer needed a new driver and wanted Dave Wood to make him one. She was ready in time for his trip to the 1986 Los Angeles Open at Riviera Country Club, where he was scheduled to meet with several the world’s best players. This was a block of wood that had a hard heart to it.”īy the time Wood had polished her up, screwed on the identifying sole plate at the bottom - the one with the big, shiny silver silhouette of Texas, with “ TEXAS GOLF CO.” across the middle of it - affixed her to a 43 ½-inch Dynamic Gold X100 steel shaft, adjusted her to a 10-degree loft, a D-3 swing weight, and gripped her up, she looked like the dozens of prototypes that he would roll up to PGA Tour events with on a weekly basis. “But it had a little bit of Elvira to it. “It was perfect in every way,” Wood recalled. “It was perfect in every way,” Dave Wood says now of “Christine.” Fred Clark He carried Christine out to the side of the workshop, opened the trunk of his Datsun B210 hatchback and placed her down to cure under the hot Texas sun.Ĭlubs of character is how Dave Wood always believed golf clubs should be made, but hot damn, the good Lord never created a block of persimmon like Christine. Named her after that Stephen King novel where a ’58 Plymouth Fury has a mind of its own and a little murderous streak to boot. By this point, she had acquired a name: Christine. Sheesh, that was a pain - there were deadlines to meet, you know? - but finally the time had come. She took longer during the drying process, too. You could tell, right from the get-go, this one was different. Finally, after a few months, it was time. Every time she was removed to get weight-checked, she wasn’t quite there yet, so back into the bath she went. This one, this perfect 208-gram block of persimmon wood, was in there for days. Her brothers and sisters, all submerged in 10-gallon mixtures of boiled linseed oil and turpentine.
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