“Nickent reports that the second-place finisher at the Price Cutter Charity Championship used a 3DX ironwood.”

When you have abandoned your wife, kids, pets, neighbors, clubs, course, and bag, you can certainly be classified as a real cyber golf nut. In order to be so knighted, you must get cool newsletters like The Wire sent your email doorstep, and read golf blogs (thegolfblog, jam boy) on a semi-hourly basis. Quite often, you come across a headline like the one above.

It doesn’t take much research (pgatour.com) to figure out just who that second-place finisher was: “A player using a 3DX Ironwood finished 2nd at the Price Cutter Charity Championship Sunday, losing by one stroke to the eventual winner after posting twenty under par.” My questions are: Is the guy running around on his “real” sponsor, slutting it up with a trashy Nickent club that he met in a 19th hole somewhere? A pro shop of ill repute? No, he’s not.

Most club contracts call for a player to have a specified number of manufacturer’s clubs in the bag, which can then be filled out with the player’s choices. Lots of times it’s those in-between clubs, the long irons or trouble clubs that move in and out with regularity.

I’m not picking on Nickent Golf, mind you. It happened that their release is the one that caught my eye long enough to write this blog. Question two is, are equipment companies too embarassed to admit that a player of lesser stature used their equipment to perform well? Hell, no. We, the buying golf public, are ALL players of lesser stature. If a guy closer to us than Phil can get better with their club, of course we’ll buy it.

It must be a legal “she said, he said” thing. If I’m not getting paid by them, I don’t want them using my name VERSUS If we’re not paying her/him, we’re not going to use her/his name and give some free publicity.

In the end, we don’t end up knowing that Vance Veazy or David Peoples or Steven Bowditch or Troy Matteson used the club. However, like Mark Felt, Nickent meets us in the garage one last time: “Last year, the player finished 53rd on the 2004 Nationwide Tour money list. With the edition of the 3DX Ironwood to his bag, the player has had his most consistent year since turning pro in 1990, making 13 of 16 cuts.”

I think that I can figure this one out. See ya’.

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