Tad Moore Hickory Golf Clubs

Tad Moore Golf, run out of a workshop in Selma, Alabama, is the most prominent maker of new hickory-shafted golf clubs in the world—playable reproductions of the wooden-shafted irons, woods, niblicks, and putters that were standard equipment before steel shafts displaced them in the mid-1930s. Moore came up through the modern club trade, building and fitting steel and graphite-shafted clubs for tour players, and turned to wood comparatively late; by his own account in a 2022 interview, a friend's needling at St. Andrews ("you make all those clubs for tour players, so you can certainly make a wood shaft club") was the spur. He got into the golf business in the late 1980s. In 2005 he reintroduced hickory clubs with designs drawn from 1920s MacGregor and William Gibson classics, which is generally described as the first production of new hickory-shafted clubs since the 1930s. One caveat on provenance: a retailer's marketing copy claims a lineage "since 1963," which is hard to square with the late-'80s entry date and the 2005 reintroduction, and reads like promotional rounding rather than fact.

Within its small world, the clubs are well regarded, and the regard is specific rather than vague. Ian Woosnam holed his winning putt at the 1991 Masters with a Tad Moore putter, now displayed at the World Golf Hall of Fame, and Moore still makes a customizable version of that model. Sandy Lyle and Woosnam have played his clubs in hickory events, and Taylor Jones won the 2020 U.S. Hickory Open with them. The endorsement to weigh most carefully, though, isn't the champions but the everyday verdict that the reproductions actually play: one buyer of the Victor model—a set patterned on the Bobby Jones clubs J. Victor East designed for Spalding—said he won't use them in tournaments because they outperform his modern Titleist irons and Mizuno blades. That kind of comment cuts in two directions. It's a genuine compliment to the build quality, but it also exposes the central tension in modern hickory reproduction: a club good enough to beat a modern blade is, in a sense, no longer faithfully period equipment, and the line between "authentic feel" and "anachronistically forgiving" is exactly what the hobby argues about.

To understand why the clubs exist at all, you have to understand the niche that produced them. Hickory golf grew out of club collecting. The Golf Collectors' Society, founded in 1970, began playing informal rounds with vintage equipment at its annual meetings—to the dismay of purist collectors who felt using the clubs was like serving tea on a Van Gogh. In the early 2000s the formation of the Society of Hickory Golfers turned those casual "hickory hacker" rounds into governed tournaments, with period-appropriate dress encouraged. The crucial enabling decision was regulatory: the SoHG's vintage division permits clubs made before 1935 or authorized reproductions, played with modern balls. Reproductions becoming legal is what spawned the cottage industry, and Moore—a former SoHG president—led it from his Selma shop. So the business is downstream of a rules body that Moore himself helped steer, which is worth naming plainly: the market and the standards it must meet were shaped by overlapping hands. That isn't necessarily corruption—the community is tiny and the same people wear several hats—but it does mean "approved for tournament play" carries less independent weight than it might in a larger sport.

The craft claims hold up reasonably well to scrutiny. Moore distinguishes the work from modern assembly directly: a modern club or putter takes him roughly ten minutes; a hickory club takes three days. The process starts from a round 7/8-inch dowel that's tapered to produce flex, then fitted to the head, stained, and finished by hand. For at least some lines he has collaborated with shaft maker Otey Crisman III, pairing turned hickory shafts to heads with modern adhesives and old-style pinned hosels, then hand-wrapping leather grips. The honest qualifier the shop itself offers is the right one: because the shafts are natural wood, the clubs won't take the same wear as modern equipment. Hickory is pliable and heavy, which is precisely why it rewards a slower swing and punishes a fast modern one—the appeal and the limitation are the same property.

The pricing tells you who the customer is. An original Victor-type set runs over $5,000, and Moore's reproductions are positioned as accessible alternatives—but "accessible" here is relative to collector-grade antiques, not to a beginner's budget. These are discretionary purchases for enthusiasts, history-minded golfers, and gift-buyers, not entry equipment, and the company's own framing ("discriminating golfers," holiday gift guides) acknowledges as much. A genuine weakness for any buyer is that the most enthusiastic third-party reviews come from the retailers selling the clubs, so glowing copy about clubs being "game-changers for champions at the Masters" should be read as marketing, not assessment.

As for where this is heading, the honest answer is that the trajectory is gentle and uncertain rather than dramatic. The underlying activity is growing but remains very small: conservative estimates put the worldwide hickory-playing population around 4,500. The U.S. Hickory Open has run annually since 2008 and the international tournament calendar spans Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, among others. In Britain the form is gaining institutional footing—the Cornwall Golf Union has formally recognized hickory golf, and the British Golf Collectors Society planned 52 fixtures for 2024. That is real momentum, but off a tiny base, and Moore operates in a field with credible competitors—Louisville Golf in particular makes a comparable, SoHG-approved reproduction line—so his prominence is leadership of a small pack rather than dominance. I'd treat the specific competitive standings and any post-2024 developments as provisional; the sources here are mostly a year or more old, the player counts are explicitly "conservative estimates," and a niche cottage industry can shift quickly with the health of one or two key workshops.

The fair summary is that Tad Moore Golf does something narrow exceptionally well: it makes hand-built wooden-shafted clubs faithful enough in feel to satisfy a community that prizes authenticity, and good enough in execution to be genuinely playable rather than decorative. Its limits are structural and largely unavoidable—a hobbyist-scale market, equipment that is fragile and demanding by design, validation that comes from within an interlocking community, and the unresolved philosophical question of how "improved" a reproduction can become before it stops reproducing anything. None of those undercut the craftsmanship; they just define the boundaries of what the enterprise is and can be.