The article below was written by Steve Carroll of National Club Golfer.
What do you tote around the golf course? Are you a tour bag merchant with a fancy trolley and dozens of dividers? Do you go simple, and pick up a pencil golf bag with a half set? Or are you one of those players who spends more time taking pictures of their waxed leather carryall than hitting shots?
It’s a topic Tom Irwin and I spent probably a little too long discussing on an episode of The NCG Golf Podcast.
“I think it’s up there with golf trousers as something that’s basically impossible to get right,” Tom said. “I been through the seven stages of man thing with bags, but I’m not really sure that I’m evolving. I’m just going around in circles wondering about the right thing to do.
“When I first started, I bought a set of Hogan Apex irons – very second hand with grips where you might as well have been holding the metal – and they came with a horrible red canvas bag with white around the top that I think you could almost pass off nowadays as being trendy. But it really wasn’t.
“Once I’d become a proper paid-up member of the golf club, I feel like there was a lot of chat about inches. I’ve got very clear memories of flicking through the Argos catalogue and being desperate to get a 12-inch golf bag.
“I reckon you ended up with these pseudo-tour bags, which were too small to be tour bags, but were leather and heavy and designed to go on a push trolley. The better you got, or the more money you had, the bigger your bag.”
So what do we think about bags? What should you carry in them? Listen to the podcast to get the whole story, but here are some of the highlights…
What does your golf bag say about you?
Is big really better?
The heaviest bag I’ve ever carried was in a British Masters pro-am for Peter Schmeichel. It was a stand bag but it weighed a ton. There must have been half of Denmark in it. There were three putters, for a start. The tournament was at Close House and anyone who has played there will know that the Colt course – and I’m a member for anyone who thinks I’m being critical – can best be described as ‘up and down’.
It taught me a valuable lesson, which is bigger is not necessarily always better when it comes to bags. I’m not yet at the stage where I’m reaching for an electric trolley. I still try to equate golf with some form of exercise and so I’ve gone small. Very small. If you’ll allow me a shameless plug, I think my current bag, the Macgregor Principal, might be the best I’ve ever had. It weighs nothing, you can pile in a full set, and you can hump it up a hill without having a coronary.
As for bigger tour bags on a huge trolley? I’ve seen enough batteries fail over the years to know it is not a foolproof solution to transporting your kit around a course.
How much bling?
“My golf bag used to be very heavy because I went through a stage of collecting bag tags,” said Tom. “So when you go to a trophy venue, you get a bag tag that you clip on.
“Bag tags are a brilliant memento, so I started getting into the habit of clipping them onto my bag but I ended up with 30 of these chunky things, with a little metal or plastic strap, that was adding significant tonnage to my bag and it was also making an absolute racket, so I had to give up that.”
I had a similar fetish for ball markers. I’d pick one up from every course I visited and, pretty quickly, I had a sizable collection clinking around the bag. Worse was I also had a habit for losing the smaller versions so I’d end up buying increasingly larger ‘poker style’ markers so I could ensure they wouldn’t go missing on their first excursion.
Pretty soon I was carrying the Royal Mint in my bag. Now I’ve got about 200 of them sat in a drawer. Was it just a monumental waste of money?
Is there a do’s and don’ts to accessories?
Do carry a valuables pouch, said Tom. Don’t forget about that banana you picked up on the 1st tee is my word of warning to you all.
Unfortunately, I did not look before putting my hand into the pocket. What a scene. I can’t say the rest of the bag was smelling particularly good, either, so be warned.
“I’ve got some of those vanity pouches,” explained Tom. “And I really want to be the sort of person who adheres to protocols with them. I want to have a nice tee vanity pouch and I want to have a nice neat glove vanity pouch so I keep those things separate.
“Then I’d even like to have a third one, that has things like a Sharpie in it, and one of those circle things you mark your ball with because I think it demonstrates order.
“But the problem is once you finish playing golf, you then just empty the contents of your pocket straight into the pocket of your golf bag and the whole thing’s just a shambles again.
“It’s a bit like when you clean your kitchen. You think, ‘I’m going to keep it exactly like this’ and after about a week it’s the same old jumble sale it was before.”
Does the stuff you have in your golf bag signify your ability as a golfer? If you’re carrying alignment sticks does that immediately imply you are a low handicapper? Who knew a golf bag could say so much about you?
