Alabama is known as football country. Statues of Nick Saban and all of the Crimson Tide’s championship winning coaches greet visitors to Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa. However, sports fans spending more time watching athletes with drivers, putters, and caddies. Five professional golfers with ties to Alabama teed up for the Masters tournament this year. And, when competitors look to buy their next set of clubs, they often turn to a spot with connections to the state’s civil rights history.
Every day, tourists from around the world walk Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was here that Martin Luther King and hundreds of protestors made Civil Rights history sixty years ago. Most of these visitors who smile for selfies by the bridge may not know there’s another famous site — or, rather, famous people — only a block away.
“I wish I had a 50 cent piece for every leather grip I put on a hickory shaft over the last 40 years,” said Otey Crisman, III. He’s taping handles onto handmade hickory golf clubs. He makes them. His craftsmanship has gained so much fame that he has personally made clubs for several U.S. Presidents. Otey learned to make hickory clubs from his father, who was a professional golfer in the 1940s.
“Well, Dad built a putter for himself and went on to qualify at the Birmingham Country Club for the US Open — fourth highest in the nation, went out on tour the next week,” Crisman recalled.”So Dad goes out with his putter and the guys said, ‘hey, Otey, I like the putter. Where'd you get it?’ And Dad said, ‘Well, I made it.’ So, ‘hey, I like that. If you ever make any more, I'd like a dozen for the shop.’”
Otey watched as his father made golfing history. Not, from winning tournaments. But, by giving golfers the weapons they needed to avoid the roughs and water hazards and try for birdies and eagles on the course.
“Well, Dad was smart enough” he said. “Kept little notepads. He wrote names down. And Dad said, ‘Well, if I'm figuring right, I've got orders for about $4,500 worth of putters.’ And in 1946, $4,500 was a lot of money. So Dad, being a right, practical guy, he came back to Selma and started making putters and shipping those putters out to the pros. So dad continued to play the tour often, probably up until about 1955, but when he went to a tournament, there was a trunk full of putters in his car.”
Crisman recalled how one particular win at the prestigious Masters Golf Tournament really changed his father’s future.
“Dad got really fortunate in 1947. Jimmy Demarit got one of Dad's putters, won the 47 Masters with his putter. And back in those days, press would give you a little bit of coverage, and Jimmy would holler, ‘old Otey's hot today’. So then somebody asked him, ‘what's an Otey’? He said, ‘well, that's what I call my putter, but that's the guy that made my putter.’ And so he won again in 1950 with an Otey. And after that, Daddy had a really good business,” Crisman said.
As the decades passed and technology began to kick in, the hickory clubs couldn’t keep up. The game of golf shifted to iron and then graphite clubs. This gradually pushed the hickory clubs from store shelves entirely. They’d become a golf curiosity chased by collectors, but nothing more.
“So I was a collector of golf clubs, I had a lot of them, and a gentleman friend of mine from Williamsburg, Virginia. He played, and he asked me if I would give it a try,” said Tad Moore. He’s a Selma transplant and the owner of the business. Tad is also a legendary golf club maker. He designed a putter that was used to win the Masters tournament in 1991. Like Otey, he has lost track of exactly how many presidents have his clubs, but he does remember designing one for Michael Jordan and, in true Alabama form, Nick Saban owns one of his clubs.
“And so I tried hickory golf, and I really liked it. So from there, I went from playing with antique clubs. Around 2001-2, it became apparent that a lot of people couldn't find clubs they wanted, and so I was making clubs for Tour players. And so everybody said, ‘well, if you make it for Tour players, you can surely make a hickory golf club.’ So I contacted Otey.”
They began by selling clubs here in the United States, but reinterest in hickory clubs has grown around the world. Tad and Otey now ship their handmade hickory clubs everywhere from Europe to South Korea to New Zealand.
“So they take to the hickory game for a couple reasons. One, the hickory game is more about shot making and things like that, rather than the current game, which is mostly about distance and yardage alone,” Moore observed.
But as enthusiasm for hickory golfing has grown, people’s interest has gone far beyond just the golf clubs. Tad is a member of the Society of Hickory Golfers. That group has been at the forefront of a resurgence in hickory golfing culture.
“Some of those people we have in our group, they've taken it to where it's almost like a reenactment group, like, you know, those people that reenact the Gettysburg fight and things like that. Well, they dress in the attire of people from the 1920s which includes it could be a jacket, it could be a coat and tie a vest,” Moore recalled.
In the room next door, Otey is working at a vehicle-sized piece of machinery with an array of tubes and wires. There is a mountain of wood shavings on the floor.
“The machine is about an 80-year-old hydraulic copy lathe,” he said with the machine whirring in the background.
All of those golf clubs that ship out across the world? This is where Otey cuts their shafts out of hickory dowels.
"You drop a piece in, you hit ‘go forward’, and about 40 seconds later you come out with a pretty nice looking hickory golf shaft. I know that we’ve had that lathe since about 1985, so it’s probably run a couple hundred thousand golf shafts,” he explained.
But of course, on an 80-year-old machine, nothing runs smoothly for long.
“This one is so old that you can’t even buy parts for it anymore. We had some electrical stuff burn out on this, and the electrician just looked at me and said, ‘that’s it’.
And as the machinery from the 1940s suggests, it’s not easy to find this sort of golf club craftsmanship anymore — no matter how many people around the world may have picked up hickory golfing.
“You know, Tad's 83, and I'll be 74 this summer,” Crisman confided. “So we're looking for somebody that would like to come in here and let us teach them how to do what we do so it just doesn't die when we go, you know.”
