Matt Freed, Post-Gazette photos Stephen Busic, of Hickey, N.C., putts yesterday during the National Hickory Championship Tournament at Oakhurst Links at White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.

By Chico Harlan, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. -- The National Hickory Championship actually exists, though this knowledge appears just about limited to its participants. This year, for the two-day golf tournament that ends today, 60 players showed up. They play 36 holes, four trips around the nine-hole course, Oakhurst Links (Est. 1884). One player wears a kilt and 16 pounds of wool. One comforts his shanks with gulps from a Bacardi flask. Somehow -- not counting the 18 sheep that roam the course -- no gallery shows up to watch.

Oakhurst's peculiarities explain its obscurity. The club sells no food or drink. The grounds are manicured to woolly 19th century standards. The course allows no rakes, no ball marks, no tees. Players, by rule, use clubs and balls constructed (or replicating construction from) before 1900, which means that some cumbersome combination of beechwood and ram's horn must strike a "gutta-percha" ball, no better designed for air travel than a ship's anchor.

	Sheep are in play, but shots may be removed free of penalty from sheep castings. Click photo for larger image.

The upshot? Most drives travel 150 yards. Shots may be removed free of penalty from sheep castings. Four rounds averaging par, on a 2,235-yard course, will win the tournament. And those who make the annual trip to Oakhurst -- aside from being collectors, history buffs (usually), retirees (oftentimes) and Civil War re-enactors (occasionally) -- fit the most curious category in golf: They like their sport preserved in 1884, back when it was not just frustrating, but impossibly frustrating.

The tournament itself is a photo negative of the U.S. Open, hosted this week at Oakmont Country Club in Pittsburgh. Oakhurst spends no money on advertising. One half-hidden sign at the end of a single-lane road notes its entrance. It employs five people, and on non-tournament days -- where, still, it forces all comers to bring or rent hickory clubs -- between four and eight players use the course. When the first round of a match-play competition ended Thursday, players retreating to the white clapboard clubhouse heard this refrain: "Done golfing? Start drinking!" It was half past noon.

Chris McIntyre introduced himself on Wednesday as The Fourth-Best Player in Hickory Golf. In many cases, you become a nationally ranked hickory player simply by beginning to play. But Mr. McIntyre, 52, a precise (and sometimes self-loathing) golfer from San Diego, aimed for a legitimate title run, a direct challenge to the sport's unflappable titan, Randy Jensen.

Tees are a no-no at Oakhurst. This gutta-percha ball is set up in the sand. Click photo for larger image.

On Sunday, Mr. McIntyre flew into Roanoke, Va., and headed for this resort town, hugged by the scenic mountainside. This alone drew notice; "You beat Randy to town," one fellow golfer said.

In the next days, Mr. McIntyre exhausted his time with practice rounds, taking three trips through the course one afternoon, five the next. He wore an Englishman's cap, shading his mustache, and walked with a brisk pace, the kind of strobing movement you see in old news footage. By Wednesday, on a final practice round before dinner, he'd familiarized himself with the course's hazards, but that awareness had little practical benefit. From a sand bunker on Hole No. 4, his first attempt for the green trickled several feet forward and then back into the trap.

"The modern sand wedge has some bounce," Mr. McIntyre explained once his groaning ceased. "But this club" -- he held the hickory shaft high in his right hand -- "is like a shovel. It's the opposite of what you would want. They didn't know any better back then."

It is 1884 at Oakhurst, but for the following anachronisms: The club has a telephone line. The club has a parking lot. Mr. McIntyre, until three years ago, when he established a hickory golf company, worked for Hewlett-Packard.

Lawren Just, of Louisville, Ky., tees off yesterday. Click photo for larger image.

Exceptions aside, Oakhurst's attention to history is steadfast. Players wear knee-length knickers or longsleeve linen shirts, like original Guinness brewmasters. Since the National Hickory Championship originated in 1998, little has changed, but for the reputation of Mr. Jensen, the six-time champion.

"Most places have over-commercialized, but we're probably on the other extreme," said Lewis Keller Sr., the modern savior of Oakhurst Links. "I think we need to keep it that way, too, because we restored the course for the love of golf, and no other reason."

In 1959, when Mr. Keller brought this property as a summer home, he used it for horses, not golf. Not since 1912 had the course been active. Still, the acreage retained evidence of its past -- a time when lawyer Russell W. Montague owned the place and paced out a nine-hole course for his own amusement; a time when the game remained so foreign to this country that U.S. customs agents impounded Mr. Montague's clubs, sent from Scotland, thinking them "implements of murder."

In his yard, Mr. Keller found cracked and yellowed balls. He uncovered the remains of one hole. Then, in the early 1990s, several friends -- including golf architect Bob Cupp -- encouraged Mr. Keller to restore the old course. Using paperwork, letters, old scorecards and months of research, Oakhurst was reborn, a near-replication of what Mr. Montague played in 1884.

Golf is largely a game of evolution, a testimony to human progress. Improving equipment and conditioning necessitate frequent recalibrations of the sport's courses and standards. A glass display case in the Oakhurst clubhouse displays a mini-timeline of six golf balls, each passing ball an advancement of the next, ending with the "modern ball." But at Oakhurst, all players receive two mulish gutta-perchas, created from a proper mold in England. Oakhurst scorecards preserved from the late 19^th century affirm what everybody nowadays is glad to see. Scores are no better today than they were back then.

Chances are strong that Randy Jensen, by today's end, will have won the latest National Hickory Championship, a sign of proper world order. Competitors here fit into two categories: Randy Jensen, and Those Who Talk About Randy Jensen. (Well, there's also Rob Ahlschwede, who fancies himself The Only Person in Omaha, Neb., to Beat Randy Jensen in Match Play.)

Earlier this week, following a practice round, five players gathered on an outdoor deck, preparing for the upcoming event with a round of Shiner Bock bottles. One player said Mr. Jensen could be defeated only with kryptonite. Another called the tournament a battle for second place. At this moment, Mr. Jensen -- a boyish looking 52-year-old from Omaha, who owns a golf shop -- was out on the course, practicing.

"Randy is an icon," Mr. McIntyre said.

"We'd have to play a great game just to compete with Randy," said another player, Tanner Stewart.

"He just recovers so well," Mr. Ahlschwede said. "It's not that he doesn't get into trouble ..."

"He just minimizes mistakes," Mr. McIntyre said. "Tremendous ability."

"But there is another thing Randy is legendary about," Mr. Ahlschwede said, "and that is food. He's very particular. He eats organic. Only water he'll drink is the stuff he brings himself. He won't drink water offered to him, no tap water. And alcohol? Never. He's very conscious about that. I work for him, so I know him well. Guy can bench press 285 pounds 11 times."

"It's like I told him yesterday," Mr. McIntyre said. "He's the Tiger Woods of hickory golf."

"He'll tell you that, too," Mr. Ahlschwede continued. "But it's like with Ali -- if you back it up, it's not bragging."

Mr. Jensen just finished writing a 300-page hickory golf book, scheduled for publication this summer. He's played Oakhurst, lifetime, more than 150 times. He played college golf at Creighton University, but in the last seven years, he's played hickory golf exclusively.

Mr. McIntyre, too, said goodbye to conventional golf seven years ago. Ask hickory golfers why they've done this -- and why, in many cases, they've spent thousands collecting the antique clubs -- the answers often trace to a larger point about history. The clubs preserve history, and history preserves stories. Many clubs were hand-made, with names stamped on the club heads. Golfers three generations removed hit identical shots on similar courses and, presumably, uttered similar curse words. One hickory golfer, after striking a perfect fairway shot, had this goose-bump realization, which he said aloud: "There has never been a better shot hit with that club."

There is, of course, another reason for scorning conventional golf.

"It's because Chris is an idiot," Mr. Stewart, of Zanesville, Ohio, said while playing with Mr. McIntyre. "He'd live in the 1800s if he could."