Everyone has the same comment
Under every vintage club video, the same thing happens. Someone describes a club they own — a Ping Anser from the early eighties with its original grip, a Wilson blade whose face they’ve measured against a nickel to check it’s the right width — and then they say some version of: I wonder what it’s worth.
Nobody ever answers properly, because a proper answer isn’t a number. It’s a method. What decade is it from. Which of the two markets wants it. What condition is it in, graded the way buyers actually grade. What have identical clubs sold for, not what are people asking.
So I wrote the method down.
Along the way it became obvious that the honest version is more useful than the exciting one. Fewer than 5% of hickory-shafted clubs carry value beyond decorative or playable worth — that’s from a long-running price guide, and it’s good news, because it means the job is elimination rather than research. Most of the pile goes in an afternoon. Then you spend real time on the two clubs that survived.
And underneath all of it there’s the club you still play. The one that’s been in the bag for thirty years. The last chapter of Volume 1 is about that club specifically, and about the arithmetic nobody does — which usually works out to less per round than a sleeve of tees.