The Nineties Compression Classic: A Right Proper Day at Aiken Golf Club
- David Stone
- 3 days ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
The decade of the Nineties was a time of change, as Americans transitioned from the Reagan/Bush Era to that of Clinton/Gore, and the world saw the Soviet Union crumble and East and West Germany reunite. People embraced the advent of the World Wide Web, synth pop and hair metal bands gave way to alt rock and hip-hop, and folks began to give up their land lines in favor of cellular phones. It was the era of Beanie Babies, the O.J. Simpson trial, and Operation Desert Storm. Generation X was coming into its own, ready to embrace change, challenge norms, and redefine the future. It was Hammer Time.
Like the rest of the world, the golfing industry was also in transition. One of the biggest changes occurred on January 25, 1991, when Callaway Golf took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to unveil their new Big Bertha driver at the PGA Show in Orlando, Florida. It was a wide-bodied, stainless steel driver with a head 23% larger than most conventional drivers of the day. Traditional wound balata golf balls began to disappear in the nineties, replaced by solid core and multi-layered models designed with new dimple patterns. Instead of forged, muscle-backed blade irons, manufacturers were now making cavity-backed irons with perimeter weighting and square grooves. "Where the game heads next," said the Orlando Sentinel's Jeff Babineau, "is everybody's mystery." Thirty-five years later, I think he would be amazed.
Fortunately for me, I got to take a trip back to the Nineties this week while playing in the Nineties Compression Classic at Aiken Golf Club. This return to the decade of soft collars and softer compression golf balls was made possible by the Committee of the Proper Golf Society, a group consisting of Robert Brutz, Buck Bryant, and Bradley Rogers. Brutz and Bryant, both of whom are from Athens, Georgia, stumbled upon their shared passion for vintage golf equipment through a chance pest-control visit, and what began as a routine service appointment became a lively conversation about the charm of classic golf gear. They were joined by Atlanta-native Rogers, who is also the data compliance manager for The Technical College System of Georgia, and their enthusiasm has spawned a movement uniting like-minded golfers who celebrate, as their website attests, "a lovingly absurd devotion to the way golf was meant to be played."
Bryant, a service manager at Arrow Exterminators in Athens, has been playing golf since age 15. He discovered the game at a family cookout when he joined his uncle in the backyard, chipping wedge shots at a 5-gallon bucket. On his fifth or sixth try, he "rang the bucket." Noticing Bryant's interest, his uncle gave him his first set of golf clubs a few weeks later—a set of PGA custom blades and some old Hogan persimmon woods—and after visiting a local driving range a few times with some friends, he was hooked. Bryant played golf in high school, and by age 18, he was playing to a 2 handicap, good enough to land a couple of small college offers. Instead, he attended Georgia Southern University for a couple of years and took a brief hiatus from golf, not picking it back up until he was in his mid-twenties. He played mostly modern clubs until about five years ago, but today, he plays mostly "retro" equipment. He says it's more gratifying to play well with persimmons and blades, plus he enjoys the looks of amazement he gets from younger golfers when he pulls out his older clubs on the practice range.
By contrast, Brutz has been playing the game almost since he could walk. The 40-year-old real estate developer recalls his grandfather Jim Brutz—once a star offensive tackle for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the AAFC's Chicago Rockets—cutting off a persimmon driver and an old blade 9-iron and fusing them together. Young Robert enjoyed whacking balls around the yard with the makeshift two-headed club until he was big enough to swing clubs of his own. He played on his high school team and competed in junior tournaments, but like Bryant, Brutz also took a leave from golf after college. He moved to Europe for his master's degree, now regretting that he didn't take advantage of all the golfing opportunities available to him there. When he returned to the game in 2009, he found the adjustment daunting. Golf technology had advanced so rapidly that everything felt different, and he didn't like it. He wanted to play with what he knew, so he played with the older clubs.
Through the years, Brutz grew increasingly disillusioned with the direction of modern golf equipment. He maintained a Twitter account under the handle @thwacknicklaus and didn't usually post very much, but when the USGA's rollback debate heated up a couple of years ago, something inside him snapped. He thought to himself, "if Major League Baseball players can hit wooden bats, why couldn't pro golfers hit persimmon woods?" He remembered rage-tweeting something to the tune of "What if everybody just played the clubs that Tiger Woods won the '97 Masters with?" Ever since, he has been the conscience of the golfing Twitter-verse, the angel on the left shoulder whispering "hit persimmons," while the devil on the right yells "let the big dog EAT!" Together, he and Bryant put together a persimmons-and-blades-only tournament the Monday after this year's Masters. They have sparked a lot of fun conversations and met a lot of interesting people, and their success inspired them to do it again, this time with a little twist.
The Proper Golf Society's Nineties Compression Classic took place on July 25 at the historic Aiken Golf Club, with equipment restrictions limited to items available from January 1, 1990, to December 31, 1999. The choice of venue was particularly appropriate, since the club had also experienced a significant transition in the 1990s under owner Jim McNair Jr., who embarked on an ambitious project to restore and rebuild the course. When Aiken Golf Club first opened in December 1912, it was the second oldest course in Aiken. It was designed as an accompaniment to the Highland Park Hotel, part of the Tufts family's vision to build a string of golf resorts between Pinehurst and Aiken, catering to the traveling elite from the Northeast. It was known then, fittingly, as the Highland Park Golf Club.
The course is rich in history, beginning with its original 11 holes designed by Donald Ross, which included today's holes 1 through 7 and 15 through 18. It operated as an 11-hole course until 1916, when John R. Inglis completed the full 18 by adding a 7-hole loop across Dibble Road, and then stayed on as the club's head professional. At the encouragement of May "Queenie" Dunn, America's first female golf pro, Inglis had tees installed specifically for female members, making it the first U.S. golf course to feature women's tees.
From 1937-39, the club hosted the Aiken Women's Invitational, attracting country's best female golfers, including Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg, Helen Detweiler, Marion Miley, and South Carolina's own Kathryn Hemphill. Beginning in 1946, it hosted the Tri-States Open, which drew some of the region's top male amateurs and PGA professionals, including three-time major winner Julius Boros, 1959 Masters champion Art Wall, and 1947 Western Open champ Johnny Palmer. Actor/Dancer Fred Astaire, who often wintered in Aiken, was a frequent visitor to the course and played in the tournament's pro-am. Local lore has it that he once danced down the iconic stone steps leading down from the tee box at the par-3 16th hole while brandishing his golf club!
When the Great Depression decimated the local tourism industry, the hotel closed down, but the golf course survived. It was bought in 1940 by the City of Aiken and operated as a municipal course under the name of Aiken Golf Club until 1959, when it was purchased by Jim McNair Sr. and renamed Highland Park Country Club. Since the city retained the right to buy the club back, McNair had little incentive to maintain the course, and after his semi-retirement as head pro, it fell into disrepair. When the younger McNair left his job at Harbor Town in 1985, he came home to help his dad run the course. After several years of contemplation and a brief consultation with golf architect Bill Coore, McNair embarked on his rebuilding project in 1996. With a skeletal staff of four, he took out several hundred trees and reshaped the course with "Ditch Witches, tractors, and a lot of 'sweat equity,'" and as Adam Schupak noted, he successfully "brought the 'Ross' back to the club in one of the better do-it-yourself course renovations you'll ever see."
When I arrived at Aiken Golf Club, I was immediately taken back well past the Nineties to a Winter Colony retreat in the early Twentieth Century. The old school clubhouse, with its gabled roof line, shaded verandas, and rustic stone work, reminded me of clubhouses I encountered in my younger days, many of which are sadly long gone. About thirty of us "proper golfers” gathered outside the pro shop, admiring each others' equipment as we awaited our tee times. The tools of the day included an impressive array of Callaway Big Bertha and Titleist 975D drivers, Ping Eye and Cleveland blade irons, and putters ranging from older blade models to early Scotty Camerons. Each club had a history with its owner, stories and tall tales to be swapped across a locker room table, but today, we weren't here just to chase the perfect shot or the perfect score. We were there to make new memories with new friends, all bound by a passion for the game of golf and a desire to play it as it was meant to be played. As the sun rose over the clubhouse, making the dew on the fairway glisten, I knew it was going to be a great day.
Amid the lush greenery and rolling terrain, the course exudes a tranquil, countryside atmosphere that feels worlds away from the city’s commercial center just a short walk away. I was struck by its natural beauty and how Ross, Inglis, and McNair made use of its natural contour and elevation changes to create a challenging test of golfing skill. It isn't a particularly long course—it plays about 5,800 yards from the tips—but do not be deceived. Its well-maintained green complexes, with their swells, humps, and false fronts, are its primary defense, and its sloping fairways stand ready to funnel an errant shot into the native areas or one of the many bunkers that dot the landscape. It's a course that puts a premium on club selection and shot placement, a unique combination of beauty and challenge that makes for a truly unforgettable golfing experience.
My partner and I did not light it up on Monday, but that wasn't really the point anyway. We weren't fighting for the final spot on the last day of Q-school. It was a day of golf the way it ought to be played: with some good shots, some bad ones, and lots of laughs, fist bumps, and stories along the way. "Overall, American golf is obsessed with hitting the ball really far, shooting the lowest score possible, and telling everyone your handicap," Brutz points out, "but there is a lot more to golf than doing those three things." Sometimes when you grind away all day, it sucks the joy out of the game. It's not a vanity exercise in who's better than whom. Bottom line, golf is a game. It's meant to be enjoyed. It's who you play with and where you play. Sometimes, what you've got in the bag becomes part of the fun.
We were there to celebrate what Bryant considers the "coolest time of golf," the era of Payne Stewart, John Daly, Fred Couples, and Tiger Woods, guys who he says were "effortlessly cool." It was also the golden age of golf equipment; a time when you could have persimmon, titanium, and steel in the same bag; of Cleveland VAS irons, Alien wedges, and Adams Tight Lies. It was a time before smartphones, smartwatches, and rangefinders. We didn't have driver heads the size of cantaloupes and putters that were taller than Muggsy Bogues, we didn't have to know our ball speed or attack angle, and...thank God...we didn't have AimPoint.
Vintage clubs are making a comeback, not because they're necessarily better but because they remind us of a time before the golf industry embraced planned obsolescence, deciding that "better" meant "newer" and "higher tech." Despite the transition from persimmon to metal, drivers were small by today's standards but still felt alive in your hands, and hitting a shot in the center of a Hogan Apex Channel Back was a sensation unlike anything you can get with today's equipment. Miss the center, and the feedback is immediate and equally clear. These clubs were honest in ways that modern clubs are specifically designed not to be. For some golfers, a club is less of a performance tool and more of an object you form a relationship with over years and decades of play. While today's club manufacturers want you to replace your set every few years, vintage golfers understand that sometimes the best club in your bag may be the one you never ever replace.
The assumption is that groups like the Proper Golf Society are for golf hipsters and older guys playing the clubs of their youth, but the fastest growing segment of the movement are the 20-30 year-olds who missed out on these clubs the first time around. It's certainly a different style of golf, but golf can be more fun with less tech in the bag. It's more relaxed, more social. The ego competition is set aside and the enjoyment of the game becomes the focus. As Bryant points out, "Sometimes the best golfing experiences come when you have low expectations."
There is a framed quote by Jim McNair Jr. in the golf shop at Aiken Golf Club which reads: "The past will lead the future of golf, and long after I am gone, the Aiken Golf Club will still be challenging golfers and remain a 'hidden gem' for those fortunate enough to fine her. For that I am very proud." He should be. The course is consistently among the courses cited by Golf Digest as a must-play destination in the Augusta area and was ranked as the 11th best classic golf course by Palmetto Golfer magazine. Golf Magazine senior writer Michael Bamberger called it the "most charming course in the United States." We need more courses like Aiken Golf Club, which offer, as Bryant points out, "accessible, interesting golf at an affordable price." At a time when 7,000+ yard courses that cost over $150 a round are becoming commonplace, vintage golf brings many of these shorter, classic courses back into play.
The Proper Golf Society's next event, "Fall at the Fields" is scheduled for November 1 at the Fields Golf Club in LaGrange, Georgia. It will be a persimmons-and-blades-only event, held at another course ranked among Golf Magazine's "Best Courses for $100 or less." If you love golf and want a new, somewhat different experience, Brutz recommends you grab a set of clubs and give it a try. It's about an experience, creating memories, making friends, and being part of a community. At the end of the day, it's about maximizing enjoyment and savoring each moment on and off the course. So, why not take the plunge? You might just meet some new golfing friends and discover a new passion that enriches your life in unexpected ways.
For more information about the Proper Golf Society and Fall at the Fields, check out https://thepropergolfer.com/
Great Article!
I had the privilege of playing in the event. Beautiful course, great company, and golf at its purest. Can’t wait until the next one!