"You can’t hit that club 200 yards into the fairway,” the caddie said. But I knew he could stripe it. After all, this was PGA Tour up-and-comer John Mallinger, a guy who nearly won The Players Championship back in 2009. For real players, it’s the swing, not the equipment, that makes the difference. Plus, I’d already hit my shot, with the same club he was being dared to use, about 220 yards into the fairway on this little par-4 dogleg-right during the 2010 Viking Classic Pro-Am at the Jack Nicklaus-designed Annandale Golf Club in Madison, Miss., just north of the capital city. “How much?” Mallinger asked with a smile. And the game was on.

He grabbed my vintage circa-1920s hickory spoon with the homemade overlapping leather grip, put a smooth swing on it ... and lightened the caddie’s wallet — 240 yards down the right-middle of the fairway with a sweet little fade.

And that’s when I knew I’d made the right decision.

Of course, there had been signs before that my switch to wooden-shafted golf clubs — vintage playables as I now know they’re called by collectors and eBay sellers throughout America and the United Kingdom — would be no passing fancy, no here-today-move-onto-the-next-new-thing-tomorrow trend that seems to be the lifeblood of golf’s mega-equipment manufacturers in the Tiger era.

It all started with a little driving mashie.

In fact, I had forgotten the iron was there, nestled in the corner of our living room, a relic that my wife, Jill, had picked up in an antique store in Laguna Beach, Calif., to use for some sort of decoration.

But one Sunday afternoon the club caught my eye, and when I began to look more closely, its secret caught my heart. And my love for the game of golf will never be the same (cue sappy Rodgers and Hammerstein accompaniment).

Driving Mashie. Hand Forged. Made in Scotland. Those were the words stamped on the clubhead. And when I hit the Google for some research, I quickly learned that T. Stewart, the master clubmaker with a famous “pipe” stamp on his work, was one of the pioneers of modern club design, plying his trade in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

And it got me thinking: Who might have played with this club? And how good of a clubmaker was this Tom Stewart? Could I hit this club today, nearly a century after it was made for one of his customers?

So out I went to my front yard, my new butter-knife-looking mashie (which hits about like a 5-iron but feels more like a 3-iron) and a handful of Pro-V1s in hand, chipping and pitching about with varying degrees of success. But this was a long iron — it needed a true test on a real golf course to determine whether it could be anything more than a novelty.

And that’s how, later that day in the scorching heat of early July, I came to find myself standing on the first tee at the Links at Riverlakes Ranch in Bakersfield, Calif., with nothing more than an early-century driving mashie and a pocket full of golf balls. No tees. No bag. No cart. Just me and a hopefully a good walk for a few holes with a single golf club.

I tossed down a ball and took a few practice swings, sucked in a deep breath and made contact. A bit of a knuckleball — my impact was nowhere near the club’s sweet spot — took flight on the 311-yard hole, finding a spot in the light rough just off the fairway about 150 yards away. It wasn’t the stuff of legends, but I had gotten the ball airborne and the club was still in one piece. The second shot felt more solid, landing about 20 yards short and bounding toward the green.

And then the magic happened.

For my third shot, I took a nice, smooth putting stroke from off the green, resulting in that heart-warming click of a perfect chip shot. The ball carried the remaining collar and hit the putting surface exactly on line, rolling out closer and closer and closer to the hole. And then it rattled the flag and disappeared. My first hole as a full-time hickory player was a birdie.

The golf gods must be crazy.

I took 104 shots with the driving mashie during those 18 holes of golf. And the next day, with just the mashie and my T.P. Mills putter, I trimmed the score to 92. But the game was no longer about the scorecard; it was now about all the things I’d only experienced tangentially — history and shotmaking and discovery.

I was a golfer reborn.

Of course I never would have thought to pick up that Tom Stewart driving mashie and give it a try if it weren’t for my buddy — and now hickory archrival — Mitch Laurance, an actor, commentator and all-around good guy probably best known for his work on ESPN’s billiards coverage or his marriage to the “Striking Viking” Swedish pool-playing superstar Ewa (Mataya) Laurance. However, I prefer to think of Mitch as James Van Der Beek’s level-headed film class teacher on the quintessential teen soap, Dawson’s Creek, and remind him regularly how great he was in the role.

It was Mitch who got me excited about the possibilities of playing hickory. During a get-together at Pinehurst in North Carolina, I watched him hit modern hickory-shafted clubs made by wooden-club manufacturing specialist Louisville Golf and custom clubmaker Tad Moore. And a few months later during an assignment in Richmond, Va., he regaled me with stories about how these clubs had transformed his perspective on the game.

Today, more than seven months later, I share his passion wholeheartedly and understand an obsession that in the beginning seemed so far away from the golf I’d known for nearly two decades. We like to think of ourselves as the McMashie Brothers, exposing our populist message of hickory golf — regardless of whether you play with replicas or vintage playables — to the willing masses or whomever will listen through an ongoing series of hickory match-play contests dubbed MashiePalooza. I would take the time to describe our inaugural MashiePalooza 1 at Lake Las Vegas’ SouthShore Golf Club, but I’m still in therapy after an unexpected turn of events there.

**WATCH MASHIEPALOOZA 1 NOW TO SEE WHO PREVAILED**

What I didn't expect to find was a flourishing hickory golf community. But it was there all along, full of players, collectors and club restorers across the country — and throughout the world — whose goal is to protect and honor a history that too often gets lost in the 300-plus-yard drives of modern golf. There’s a Society of Hickory Golfers with a national championship and more than a few true experts on the evolution of the game. And there are many affordable clubs to be found for players looking to get started.

One day, while searching the Internet for hickories to add to my bag — I’m now trying to collect a complete set, club by club, of dot-punch-face hickory irons by Tom Stewart — I ran across an eBay seller with the screen name bogeeh8r in Tulare, Calif., just about an hour’s drive from my home in Bakersfield. That man, Jimmy Hill, a plus-1 steel-shaft handicapper (who figures he’s about a minus-2 with hickories) led me to another seller, Arlie Morris — oldhickory on eBay — a PGA life member who restores clubs in my childhood hometown of Porterville. Together, I’ve become an apprentice of sorts in their garages while learning the basics of hickory maintenance: tightening up clubheads, re-gripping clubs, fixing cracked shafts.

And from my connection with Arlie and Jimmy, I’ve found other hickory stories across the country, like B.J. Blanchard of Birmingham, Ala., who has collected nearly 10,000 wooden-shafted golf clubs, about 7,000 of which were donated to the city of Summerdale, Ala., for a museum five years ago but are expected to be auctioned off this month to make room for a new school in the historic building where they were housed.

“I just kept piling them up,” says Blanchard, a self-described good ’ol Cajun boy from Louisiana who made his fortune in the oil and gas industry and still owns about 1,500 of his “best” clubs. “I did very little alcohol in my life, no drugs whatsoever. I did throw away a lot of money on women, but I quit doing that because I’ve got a great wife now. So I had to spend my money somewhere, and it was on golf clubs.”

And then there’s Chris McIntyre in northern San Diego County, a machinist by trade who took it upon himself to solve the need for vintage golf balls to complete the hickory golf experience.

“In 2004, we went over to Scotland as a group from the Golf Collectors Society to spend some time with the British Golf Collectors Society and play in the Scottish Hickory Championship and then play at a few other courses, and of course the Old Course,” says McIntyre, who runs Play Hickory, a company that supplies hickory clubs, vintage bags and replica balls to events across the country. “So we were flying home and I said, ‘This is so cool — we’re playing with old clubs, we’re playing these historic courses, but we’re playing with a Pro-V1.’ And I was thinking there’s got to be something better. The ball is great, but playing such a high-tech ball just seemed wrong. So I said, ‘I’m going to find a way to make a ball for hickory.’ And that’s what got it into my mind.”

**READ THE INTERVIEW WITH PLAYHICKORY.COM'S CHRIS McINTYRE**

The results are a 1880s-era ball and a 1920s-era ball that bring the historic ambiance of the game to life even more. And one place you can feel that history is at the Old Bandon Golf Links nine-hole course in the heart of the Oregon town many consider the “new” home of golf, thanks to the popularity of Bandon Dunes Resort.

“I bought my own set of 1920s-era hickories about four or five years ago and play them occasionally and enjoy the game,” says Troy Russell, a man with a course maintenance pedigree that runs from Bandon Dunes to Tetherow to work at four U.S. Opens, three Masters and a Presidents Cup, among other marquee events.

Troy and his wife, Kim, operate the relatively unchanged Old Bandon Links, also built in the 1920s, where for $80 you can play nine holes with 1880s-era rental clubs and three of McIntyre’s replica golf balls. And for $55, you can play with 1920s sticks.

“I can hit it about as far with that driver as I can with a titanium driver — well, maybe that’s not true, but I score about as well,” he says. “And with the softer balls, when you’re trying to shape a shot and you pull it off, it just makes you feel so good. The new equipment is so forgiving that you don’t know if you did it or the tool did it, so it’s not as satisfying to hit a pure shot with new stuff as it is with the old stuff. You really feel like the king of the world when you hit a nice shot with the old stuff. And when you hit it with a gutta percha ball, with the 1880s equipment, then you really feel like a king.”

“Golf is hard enough,” they say. At least that’s the point made by an occasional friend or acquaintance who questions why I would choose to make the game “more difficult” by opting out of the technological explosion.

But in many ways, I believe true golf has very little to do with the sticks and everything to do with creativity and a sense of adventure. For me, golf is about rising to the challenge directly ahead, that feeling of making the club do exactly what I envision, whether it be a 120-yard half shot or 180-yard fade to a tucked pin — both of which I can hit with my driving mashie.

As for scoring, it’s still there — some days better than others. But my love for the game, consistency, desire to practice and pure fun I have simply swinging the golf club is a feeling that, like Tom Stewart’s clubheads, will last for the rest of my life.