Back in time for a round

Jay Renicker picked up the strange-looking clubs made of hickory with the even strangersounding names.

Mashie? Niblick?

“I’ll just have to figure out what’s what,” said Renicker, a longtime golfer who nonetheless has never mashed a mesh-style golf ball of the sort used in the 1920s.

“This, I think, is a putter,” he said, hoisting a club that at least looked familiar.

So it went Saturday, as 80 golfers donned knickers, ties and Big Apple caps — pouffy hats resembling a sand bag with a brim — for a day on the links, ’20s style, in the name of charity.

The Pikes Peak Hickory Classic at Patty Jewett was, organizers said, the first antique golf tournament in Colorado Springs.

Essentially, hickory golf involves turning back the clock on 80 years of golf progress. Along with antique clubs and balls, players must wear clothes from the period, and there are no golf carts. Local high school students were on hand to volunteer as caddies.

Chris McIntyre of San Diego collects and restores antique clubs for such events and brought the equipment for Saturday’s tournament.

He sees an increasing interest among golfers to step back to the golden age of the sport, when it spread beyond the elite and players such as Bobby Jones enthralled the nation.

“It was a time when the common people were getting a chance to play, because America was making clubs and it was a fun thing to do,” McIntyre said.

Of course, a round of hickory golf shows how modern innovations have eased play. McIntyre said most hickory golf players score five to 10 points above their normal — in golf, that’s bad.

Golfer Warren Dale realized that even before he began.

“It’s going to be a long day,” Dale said. “There will be a lot of triple-digit (scores) today.”

Players were split, meanwhile, on the benefits of wearing knickers, knee-high socks, long-sleeve shirts, ties and big floppy caps on a day when the temperature climbed into the mid-80s.

“This is way too uncomfortable,” Dale said. “I don’t know how they did it back then.”

Along with $300 entry fees, players spent $100 or more on the garb, and most ordered it from Web sites that cater to hickory golf players.

“I didn’t have this in my closet,” golfer John Hilbert said.

“I kind of like this. I might be wearing this more often,” he added, perhaps joking.

Joking aside, the golfers were playing for a serious cause.

The event raised $10,000 for the Pennies for Nicoll Foundation, a charity established by Doug and Tracie Nicoll of Colorado Springs.

Their son Douglas died in 2003 at age 3 from Sanfilippo syndrome, a rare degenerative disorder that slowly assaults the organs.

Their other son, Cameron, 5, also suffers from it, though an experimental stem-cell transplant has given him a chance at better health.

While the disorder has left Cameron developmentally disabled, his mother said he is “100 percent recovered from the transplant.”

“He is learning new skills all the time, so we have hope for him,” said Tracie Nicoll, decked out in a 1920s-style dress and hat on Saturday.

The money raised Saturday will go toward research into the disorder.

Organizers said they hope to make the hickory golf tournament an annual event.