The Common & Recent Bogeymens Golf Club

The Last Hickory-Shafted Champion

At Garden City Golf Club on Long Island, John W. “Johnny” Fischer Jr. arrived carrying clubs from golf’s passing age. Their shafts were hickory. Around him, steel had become the new material of serious competition: straighter, more uniform, more durable, easier to manufacture to repeatable specifications. The argument was over. Fischer had not conceded it. He played the 1936 United States Amateur Championship with hickory.

By then Fischer was no nostalgic curiosity. He had been the 1932 national intercollegiate individual champion at the University of Michigan and had represented the United States in the Walker Cup. He belonged among the best amateurs in the country, so his hickory was no collector’s quirk. He was asking the older equipment to perform against the best players in America while those players were increasingly armed with its replacement.

Hickory demanded something different from a golfer. A wooden shaft was not inert. It flexed, twisted, and returned through the stroke with a personality that varied from club to club. The golfer could not simply impose himself upon it. Timing, rhythm, and hands mattered. The club talked back.

The great hickory golfers learned individual clubs almost as one learns individual horses. A golfer came to know a favorite mashie or spoon through thousands of strokes. Golfers manipulated trajectory and curvature because manipulation was part of playing the game. They learned punches, runners, pitches, fades, draws, and half-shots not as specialty techniques but as ordinary vocabulary.

Steel did not abolish those skills. It changed the bargain between golfer and club.

The United States Golf Association approved steel shafts in 1924. The R&A followed in 1929. Steel was widely adopted during the early 1930s because it offered less torsion and much greater manufacturing consistency. Every club in a set began to behave like its neighbors. Golf equipment became more reproducible, more predictable, and eventually more powerful. Inverness credits Billy Burke’s 1931 U.S. Open at the club as the first won with steel-shafted clubs.

The advantage was real. Golf adopted steel because steel was better suited to the direction competitive golf was moving.

The championship itself became an ordeal. Fischer met 1933 U.S. Open champion Johnny Goodman in the semifinal while a severe storm struck Long Island. The New Yorker, reporting from Garden City at the time, called the event “A Championship in a Hurricane.” Wind drove rain across the course, signs blew over, enormous tents collapsed, and the lights failed. They kept playing. Fischer beat Goodman and reached the final.

There he met Jack McLean of Scotland.

Fischer was three down with eight holes remaining and playing on a sprained ankle taped between rounds. He cut into McLean’s lead and reached the 34th one down.

Then the stymie intervened. Under the match-play rules of the day, since abolished, a ball blocking an opponent’s line to the hole stayed where it lay unless the two balls were within six inches. Fischer’s ball lay on the green closer to the hole, while McLean putted from beyond it. McLean ran his putt past and left himself stymied behind Fischer’s ball. He could do no better than halve the hole.

Both men birdied the 35th.

Fischer came to the 36th one down. McLean was safely in position to make three, so Fischer needed a two to extend the match. From twelve feet, he made it.

They returned to the first tee all square.

On the 37th hole Fischer faced another birdie putt, this one about twenty feet.

He made that too.

John W. Fischer had won the United States Amateur Championship with hickory-shafted clubs.

The official record reduces the finish to a line: Fischer defeated McLean on the 37th hole at Garden City Golf Club. The equipment is what makes the line matter. The Society of Hickory Golfers identifies Fischer as the last player to win the U.S. Amateur using wood-shafted clubs.

Nothing magical happened when the putt fell. Hickory shafts did not become obsolete that afternoon, nor did every golfer replace his clubs the following morning. Technological eras rarely end so neatly. The transition had begun years earlier and continued afterward.

Fittingly, the last great hickory win came in the U.S. Amateur rather than a professional tournament. The amateur game preserves an older conception of golf: the match rather than the purse. Fischer received no enormous check and accumulated no season-long points. He won a championship whose prize was the championship itself.

For roughly a generation before Fischer, the great figures of modern golf had grown up with wooden shafts in their hands. Harry Vardon, James Braid, and J.H. Taylor built the vocabulary of championship golf with them. Walter Travis, Francis Ouimet, Walter Hagen, and Bobby Jones used them. Jones completed his extraordinary 1930 season—the U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur, Open Championship, and Amateur Championship—with hickory shafts even though steel was already legal. Much of modern golf—its swings, strategies, recoveries, and remembered shots—came from clubs whose shafts had once been trees.

Hickory was not a crude draft awaiting the proper club. It was mature equipment for a mature game.

Its limitations helped shape that game. Hickory encouraged tempo because violence could overwhelm the shaft. It rewarded center contact because the equipment offered less forgiveness. The balls flew shorter distances, leaving more of the golf course in play. Firm ground, contours, wind, and trajectory mattered. A golfer with a dozen clubs still needed far more than a dozen shots.

Modern golfers who try hickory first notice only what’s missing. The driver does not launch a modern ball at modern speed. An iron struck poorly provides little assistance. Distances become uncertain. The shaft can feel alive to the point of disobedience.

Stay with it and the club starts asking the golfer to take part.

A smooth swing produces something a violent one cannot. A ball can be allowed to run rather than commanded to stop. A six-iron stops being a yardage and becomes several flights. The player begins looking at the ground again. Golf becomes less a sequence of standardized aerial distances and more a negotiation among club, ball, wind, turf, and intention.

That game did not die in 1936. Much of it remains available with modern equipment to anyone willing to play it.

Fischer’s win marks the close of its first age. Steel prevailed, then came aluminum experiments, fiberglass, graphite, titanium, launch monitors, interchangeable weights, and computer-designed clubfaces. Golf equipment became more consistent and more sophisticated.

On September 19, 1936, Johnny Fischer walked to one more tee carrying clubs whose time had passed.

Hickory had one hole left.

It was enough.

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