There is a small experiment that almost every amateur should perform, in the off-season or on a slow evening at the home course, and that almost no amateur ever does. The experiment is to play a round, in the late light of a weekday evening with no card being kept and no group behind, with seven clubs in the bag and a putter. The seven clubs are the player’s own choice, chosen on the kitchen table before the round, on the basis of which clubs the player believes they hit the best. The seventh clubs are not the seven clubs the player would have predicted, on a Tuesday morning at the office, that they would have chosen. The seven clubs almost never include the three iron. The seven clubs almost always include a wedge the player has been pretending was a chipping wedge and has, in the carrying of it to the course, not used for a chip in three years. The score the player produces, on the same course they have been playing all summer with a full bag, is, in nearly every case anybody who has run the experiment will tell you, within a shot or two of the score they would have produced with all fourteen clubs in the bag. The experiment is the case for the half set.
What the half set asks of the player
The first thing the half set does is to put the player in the position of having to make a decision about every shot. The fourteen-club bag, on a calm day on a course the player knows, produces a sort of mechanical selection. The shot is one hundred and forty-five yards. The seven iron goes one hundred and forty-five. The player pulls the seven iron. The decision was, in any meaningful sense, not a decision. The half set takes that mechanism away. The shot is one hundred and forty-five yards. The bag contains a six iron and a nine iron, the seven and the eight having been left at home as a deliberate choice. The player now has to think about whether the shot is a smooth six or a hard nine, about which wind the shot is into, and about which miss is the more acceptable on the hole in front of them. The decision is a real decision. The player, over the course of the round, makes about fifty real decisions about real shots. The fourteen-club round had about twelve real decisions and thirty-six selections. The two rounds, when the player walks them, do not feel the same.
The second thing the half set does is to reveal which of the player’s clubs they have been carrying out of habit. Most amateurs have one club, and sometimes two, that they have been afraid to admit they do not hit well. For the male player in his fifties the club is usually a long iron. For the player who grew up playing in a windier part of the country the club is usually the three wood. For the player who has, at some point, bought a hybrid because the magazines suggested it the club is sometimes the hybrid, which has occupied the space in the bag of the long iron the player did not hit before. The half set leaves these clubs at home, and the player discovers, over the course of the round, that the holes on which they would have used the unloved club are holes that play perfectly well with a club they actually hit. The hole the player has been bringing the three iron out for, every Saturday, is a hole that plays better with a five wood from the same tee, on the player’s own evidence, when the three iron is not in the bag to default to.
The argument the score makes
The argument the half set makes for itself, in the end, is the argument the score makes. The player who walks off the eighteenth green with a card that is, give or take, the same number they would have shot with a full bag is the player who is, on the strict accounting of the experiment, no worse off without seven of the clubs they thought they needed. The corollary, which is the more interesting one, is that the seven clubs at home in the cupboard were not, on the day’s evidence, doing the work the player thought they were doing. The work was being done by the seven clubs in the bag, and by the player’s improved engagement with the question of which of the seven to use on each shot. The bag had become smaller. The mind had become more involved. The score had not moved.
The half set is also, on the broader question of how much the modern fourteen-club bag is actually serving the amateur game, a piece of practical evidence. The bag the rules permit is a bag built around the tour-level player whose distance gapping requires a club every yard or so across a hundred-yard range. The amateur, whose distance gapping is rarely so precise and whose dispersion is rarely so consistent, does not need every yard. The amateur needs the clubs they hit confidently, in the rough yardage range the course will ask of them, and a putter. The seven clubs that satisfy those requirements are, for nearly every amateur, the same seven clubs they would have picked on the kitchen table. The other seven are clubs they have been carrying because the bag has fourteen slots, not because the seven would have been missed.
Why the half set never quite catches on
There is, against the case for the half set, a small set of cultural objections that are worth acknowledging. The first is that the full bag has, for most amateurs, a meaning that is not strictly about the score. The bag is a piece of equipment the player has built up over years, that has, in its slots, the clubs the player has bought after fittings and the clubs the player has been given as gifts and the clubs the player has carried since their twenties. Leaving seven of them at home, for a Saturday round, is a small act of letting go that the average golfer does not particularly want to perform. The second objection is the social one. The player who turns up to the first tee with a small bag and seven clubs gets looks from the playing partners. The looks are the looks the playing partners give the player who has, in their reading of the situation, given up on the game in some quiet way. The third objection is the practical one. The seven clubs, on the holes that the course was built to ask the fourteen-club bag, occasionally produce a shot that is a longer iron or a less-comfortable wedge than the player would have liked. The shot is occasionally a shot the full bag would have made easier.
The objections are, taken together, reasonable but not, on the broader balance, persuasive. The bag the player has built up is not the bag the player needs to play with on every round of their life. The looks from the playing partners are the looks the playing partners get over by the third tee. The shot that the seven clubs make harder is, on the year-long accounting of the player’s rounds, a shot the player faces on perhaps two holes a year, and that the full bag would have made marginally easier rather than reliably easier. The case for the half set is not the case for retiring the full bag. The case for the half set is that the seven-club round is, for most amateurs, the round that produces the most learning about which clubs they actually need.
The smaller suggestion
The smaller, more modest suggestion that the half set leads to, even for the player who does not want to leave half their clubs at home, is that the fourteen-club bag is asking the player a question the player should be answering plainly. The question is which seven of the clubs in the bag are doing the work. The player who can name the seven, on the kitchen table on a Tuesday evening, is a player who has thought about their bag in a way most amateurs have not. The player who tries the seven-club round, even once, will be able to name the seven much faster the next time the question comes up. The fourteen-club bag is fine. The fourteen-club bag is what the rules allow. The seven clubs inside it that the player would still be carrying if they could only carry seven are the clubs the player should be working on, and the clubs the player should be trusting on the course, the rest of the time.
Pack the bag light, on a slow evening one week soon, and walk the course in the late light with the seven clubs that you, on the kitchen table, picked first. The round will be quicker than the full-bag round. The score will be within a shot or two of the full-bag score. The walk will be the walk on which the player learns more about their game than they have learned in a season of practice. The half set is, on the strict accounting of the experiment, the round most amateurs would play every Saturday if they had ever, even once, played it.