Society of Hickory Golfers
Kindred-club note on the Society of Hickory Golfers — the take-the-bit-seriously society closest to the C&RBGC's own register.
Of all the clubs we count as kin, the Society of Hickory Golfers shares our register most exactly. It is a volunteer society of a few hundred members that has appointed itself the closest thing American hickory golf has to a governing body, and then governs by consent rather than command—writing equipment and tournament guidelines that most playing groups adopt because they are good, not because anyone is obliged to. To bind yourself voluntarily to a set of standards, in earnest, over a game played for pleasure, is the same move the C&RBGC made when it adopted Robert's Rules. We recognize the gesture.
What we take from it is the proof that the bit can be load-bearing. The Society plays the game with clubs made before roughly 1935 and treats that constraint as the whole point, not a handicap; the seriousness is genuine and the subject is, gloriously, hickory-shafted niblicks. For the full treatment—its founding out of a 1999 rules dispute, the replica-club fault line, the U.S. Hickory Open—see Society of Hickory Golfers Overview.
