Wood you believe it – Persimmon treasure found.

If you are like me, you have lots of stuff in your garage, loads of it including several old unloved bbq’s. In fact, everything known to man …other than a car! Every hundred years or so we have to hire a skip and get rid of the absolute rubbish accumulated over the years. However, sometimes you do find things you had completely forgotten about, things that some time, way back in your life meant a great deal to you.

This is what I found recently.

To my great surprise I found my very, very old John Letters Persimmon woods. When I was much younger, I used to hammer my way around many courses in my home town of Glasgow.  I use the word ‘woods’ as that’s what they used to be called  as they were made from a hard wood, now we call them drivers… among other things which is somewhat less appeal. Woods where ‘hand crafted’ when made of wood but that very expensive apparently so Taylor Made decided to make their woods from metal which gave them a far greater margin of profit to use in promotion, advertising and sponsorship.

It may just be the passing of time but I think you got a much better feel of the ball when the world was persimmon. Drivers have fundamentally changed over the last 20 years or so, but remember most legends played these clubs. Nick Faldo used them to great effect when he won the Open at Muirfield in 1992, as he says he could make “the ball stay low to avoid the winds in the final winning holes”.

The persimmon driver was indeed made from a large chunk of persimmon wood with some lead added into the middle of it to give it weight. The hitting area was a plastic insert glued into the face which all seems primitive now but this was how they were when John Letters was making them in Scotland a long time ago.

As I say I do think you got a much better feel of the ball with ‘real woods’. Its been a great find and they look “not too shabby” now they have been cleaned up. Maybe I’ll even take them out for a little knock…Hitting it hard!

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