Best Bag: Going to golfing heaven with style and Grace

Going to golfing heaven with style and Grace

By Richard J. Galasso

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We all have a friend who carries around that golden bag. The golden bag is the one that’s overflowing with brand new state-of-the-art equipment—the fancy new lob wedge, the alien-shaped mallet putter, the world’s biggest driver. Everything is up to date, cutting edge and expensive.

More often than not, the man or woman who has the golden bag is the same one who hits four or five provisional shots each round.We all know these people: the high society high scorers.

On the other hand, we’ve all seen the guy who rolls his rickety old clubs to the first tee—the ones with the hickory shafts his father gave him 40 years ago—and hauls off further than the rest of us. When we look at his equipment we can’t understand how it doesn’t just disintegrate in his hands, yet he’s somehow managing to pull birdies out of that old paisley patterned bag.

Good gear doesn’t make a good player. So when my editors asked me to put together my ultimate golf bag, I was a little wary. I didn’t it want it to read like a laundry list of the priciest new clubs because that’s not the right way to assemble your tools. Even in a fantastical situation where I could choose any club I might want, it would be silly to just pick out the most lavish. Every player is different and golfers need to pick their tools based on their own personal style of play, not because some independent research corporation deems them the season’s best.

So I agreed to put together my perfect golf bag on one condition—I get to put together an ensemble that’s right for me, and not some random sampling of this year’s hottest picks. So remember, this is what I would want in my arsenal. Yours would probably look much different, and the next guy’s even more so. Look, you can’t buy your way under par. That’s a given. But what fun is it to play if you can’t dream a little bit?