Little shop of hackers
Low-handicappers are also welcome at America’s oldest golf store–which happens to be just a drive and an easy five-iron from downtown Chicago
By Rick Kogan
Tribune staff reporter
Published April 1, 2007
One Saturday afternoon in late February, as winter was gearing up to give the Chicago area a final serious smack, an 82-year-old suntanned man named Arnie Marzullo is in search of something to whack this summer.
“I just got back from Florida, yesterday,” he is saying to Charlie Klees, who owns and is working at Klees Golf Shop in the Beverly neighborhood on the Far South Side. “My buddy had this club. He let me hit it and I was hitting it great. You got one, Charlie? You got a Cobra 440?”
“Somewhere,” says Klees, heading toward the back of the store. “Somewhere. I know it’s here.”
The Cobra 440 is more formally known as Cobra 440 SZ Conforming Graphite Shaft. It is a driver, the most revered of golf clubs. It retails for something in the neighborhood of $499.
“Look. I’m not married. I don’t have a girlfriend,” says Marzullo, whose wife died five years ago. “I don’t gamble. But I am crazy. I buy golf clubs.”
He is part of a large and free-spending “asylum.” There is no more optimistic sporting creature on Earth than the golfer, convinced that a longer drive, a truer putt, a lower score are hidden among the clubs and balls–perhaps even the shoes, tees, gloves and suspect gizmos–that fill a golf store. And they are willing to spend the money to find those things, sometimes a great deal of money…Continue reading
