Dr. Baker’s Vintage Golf Bag (Karsten IIIA)

A vintage and modern setup: the story, the specs, and the data

This is my left-handed bag. The three clubs I bought for it cost $492.06, and everything else in it came from a $100 Woot set and a few years of thrift stores. The three: a Ping G410 SFT driver, a Cleveland CBX ZipCore sand wedge, and a PXG Blackjack putter cut to fit a 6'5" wingspan on a 5'11" frame. The irons are Ping Karsten IIIAs from around 1980, a factory-matched left-handed set I found thrifting in Kentucky. Every purchase was bought used, checked against the actual spec (loft, flex, handedness), and negotiated. I never set foot in a fitting studio. I did it with a tape measure, a golf app, and a lot of eBay listings.

“Vintage where the design stopped changing. Modern where it didn’t. A shelf in the garage for everything else.”

The idea

Golf equipment did not improve at the same rate everywhere. Drivers, sand wedges, and putters got dramatically better. Irons mostly did not, not since Karsten Solheim came up with perimeter weighting, which is still the idea behind every game-improvement iron sold today. So I spent money in the three slots where the technology moved and kept the 1980 irons. Against a $3,000 bag that costs me about 3 to 6 yards per full swing club, and nothing from 85 yards in, where most of my strokes happen.

What I spent

The bag as it stands

Fourteen clubs. The lofts on the Karstens are not guesses. I tracked down a full Karsten I spec sheet and the published Eye 2 specs, the generations right before and right after my set, and they agree within about a degree. Yards marked with a dagger (†) were measured on the course with 18Birdies. The rest are targets.

A note on the pitching wedge. When the lofts came in at 45°, the same as the 9-iron, I considered cutting it. Then I looked at the data. The PW has the tightest spread of any club I own and a wide sole that gets through rough the thin 1980 sole cannot. Same loft, different club. It stays. Retired for good: the Karsten 1-iron (16°, basically my 3-wood), the Karsten 3-iron (21°, one degree off my 5-wood), the Eye 2 and IIIA drivers, a Kroydon 9-iron from the hickory days, a Super Concorde 5, and a Lynx Predator 4-wood. Each one got replaced by a club in the bag that does the same job and launches.

What the IIIA actually is

Ping never wrote any of this down. Here is what I have pieced together from the classic-club forums, the used market, and the clubs themselves.

The dating. The Karsten I came out in the late 1960s, the Karsten III was on pro shop racks by 1976, and the Eye 2 arrived in 1982. My IIIAs sit in the gap, most likely 1978 to 1981.

The A. The A means left-handed, and the forums supplied the reason. An owner on GolfWRX who plays a IIIA set from sand wedge to 1-iron wrote that he has only ever seen them in left hand, and asked whether Ping made the original EYE in left hand at all, or whether the IIIA was what they sold left-handers instead. The used market answers him: right-handed Karsten IIIs are everywhere, right-handed IIIAs essentially do not exist. The III was the right-handed club; the IIIA was the same design built for the other side. For a few years, if you were a lefty who wanted Pings, this was the set.

The family. A right-handed Karsten III 1-iron listed online reads Toe-Heel Balance, 17-4 steel, red dot, the same stamps and steel on my heads with the words in the other order. The III sets ran through a sand wedge and so did the IIIA line, which means a left-handed IIIA sand wedge exists somewhere. It is on the thrift list.

The grooves. People who know Ping history ask about the Eye 2 square-groove lawsuit, the one that let John Daly play 1980s Eye 2 wedges on tour in 2010 under a grandfather clause. My irons are older than the argument. Square grooves arrived with the Eye 2 in 1984; the IIIA has ordinary 1970s V-grooves, never in dispute, never needing a loophole. The outlaws’ law-abiding older siblings. If I ever pull an Eye 2 wedge from a Lexington thrift store, it gets a plaque.

What they are worth. Karsten III singles trade for $25 to $45; a full left-handed set listed in the UK for about $190. The market treats them as good old clubs, not collectibles. Collectibles sit in cases. These play.

How I sourced the lofts

There is no factory spec sheet. An owner who called Ping with his serial number got a production year and nothing else. So I went the long way around. A full Karsten I sheet (1i 16, 2i 18, 3i 21, 4i 24, 5i 28, 6i 32, 7i 36, 8i 40, 9i 45, PW 50) and the published Eye 2 specs from 1982 (4i 25, 5i 28.5, 7i 35.5, 9i 43) bracket my set from either side, and they barely differ. The IIIA came out between them, so 24 / 28 / 32 / 36 / 40 / 44 / 50 is my working ladder until a loft machine says otherwise. It also settled one thing for good: vintage lofts run 6 or 7 degrees weaker than a modern iron with the same number. Your 29° 7-iron is my 5-iron. Compare by loft.

The woods got their numbers from a forum owner who put a full Karsten wood set on a loft machine: 3-wood 15, 4-wood 19, 5-wood 22. So my 5-wood is about 22°, and my Pinemeadow 3-wood at 15° carries the exact loft a Karsten 3-wood did sixty years ago. Three-wood lofts never inflated; iron lofts inflated 5 to 7 degrees. The inflation was marketing, not engineering. His measured irons ran up to two degrees off the printed sheet, the 7-iron most. Old lofts wander, mine included; the machine gets the final word.

Table 1. The spec sheet nobody printed

Since nobody printed one, I built it. Lofts are the sourced ladder above. Lie and length are extrapolated from the Eye 2 sheet, which is how Ping built irons in that era, and the black dot on mine means standard. The modern column is a current Ping G440 set at Ping’s published standard specs, same number against same number. Shaft models are read from the surviving labels (weights per the vintage Ping shaft references, with the ZZ Lite at 115 grams confirmed in the compiled Ping shaft chart).

The loft gap has a shape: four degrees at the 4-iron, seven at the 7-iron, a degree and a half at the PW, zero at the wedges. Manufacturers strengthened the scoring irons hardest, because a longer 7-iron sells clubs, and could not touch the wedges without breaking the short game. The club my friends most want to compare is the one where the stamp lies the most.

Modern irons also run about a half to a full degree more upright and a quarter to half inch longer, club for club. A 6'5" wingspan on a 5'11" frame wants flatter and shorter, and the Karstens are both. My fitted friends paid to have theirs bent. Mine came that way.

The shafts I read off the clubs. Labels survive on nearly every vintage Ping I own, and almost all say the same thing: Ping ZZ Lite, the company’s own 115-gram steel, on the woods, both shelf drivers, and most of the gamer irons. So the joke is confirmed rather than estimated: Ping’s 115-gram shafts were the lightweight option of 1980, up against everyone else’s 125-gram Dynamic Golds, and my set wears the light ones. Two clubs broke the pattern, and both are irons: the shelf 3-iron reads True Temper Dynamic S, and the gamer 5-iron’s faded label appears to read True Temper too. Two irons reshafted is the signature of a single repair visit somewhere in fifty years. The biggest single gap is still the 5-wood: 115 grams of steel against 65 of modern graphite, 50 grams heavier, and it went 174 off a tee anyway. The one shaft modern by weight is the driver’s Alta CB 55, the same 55 grams Ping ships today.

Table 2. Same number, different truth

The tee-box comparison, same-number against same-number, with the loft gap that explains most of the difference and what each modern pick costs over what I paid. The picks are real models that come left-handed.

Modern same-number irons fly 8 to 14 yards farther than mine and carry 4 to 7 degrees more loft to do it. At two yards a degree, the stamp accounts for nearly all of the gap; the engineering is worth 3 to 6 yards. Rows 1, 13, and 14 are the slots I paid for, each at or under the used market price.

What the range and the course have said so far

Notes on the data. The CBX gave me three repeatable numbers almost by accident: 90 on a regular full swing, low 70s on a three-quarter, about 60 on a half. My gap wedge lands around 95 and the PW about 100, so the wedges are stacked inside ten yards at normal tempo. I probably swing the short wedge harder than the long one. A controlled-tempo session will tell me. Three clubs have each thrown one shot about 20 percent past the rest (149 with the 7-iron, 127 with the 9-iron, 116 with the gap wedge). I assumed I was tagging the wrong club. The swing analysis below says otherwise: I have two swings, and the long shots are the good one. One more check came from the backup set. The Pinemeadow 6/7 combo, about 30°, averaged 132 on normal swings (127 to 137), dead on my Karsten 5-iron where the ladder said it would land, and threw 152, 154, and 158 on three of eight, the same twenty percent jump. A club from a different maker, never used to build the ladder, confirmed both findings at once. And the 5-wood went 174 off a tee, forty yards past the 3-wood’s average. One swing is not a verdict, but it is a start.

What the money actually buys

The honest part. Modern irons forgive a mishit better than mine do, and they launch higher, so they hold firm greens where mine land and run. I play for that by landing approaches five to ten yards short and letting them release. I am conceding the 13 percent I do not have so the 87 percent I got for a fifth of the price reads as fact.

What the swing is doing

I ran two swings through the 18Birdies analyzer, face on. One passed 4 of 11 checkpoints. The other passed 9. Same setup, same clubs, same golfer. Here is where they differ.

The bad swing is a chain: the lead arm bends at the top, the hips slide instead of turn, and the tempo goes with them. A bent lead arm shortens the swing and has to recover on the way down, which is the slightly fat, slightly thin strike that costs 15 to 20 percent of the distance. Hip sway moves the bottom of the swing and brings the club over the top with the face open, which is the slice. That chain explains the two sets of numbers in my logs. The jump is the same size on four different clubs now, roughly a club and a half, and on the combo it showed up three swings in eight. Head movement shows up in both swings, so it is the long-term project, not the thing wrecking shots. The useful part is that everything that differs already passes in the good swing. I am not learning a new move. I am learning to make the one I have more often. No club in anyone’s bag fixes that, including mine.

Where the bag actually ranks

By equipment I sit at solid intermediate: the scoring end is advanced, the long end is beginner hardware doing carefully assigned jobs, and the irons gap like an intermediate set and forgive like a beginner one. By management I am ahead of most advanced players, because the typical single-digit golfer knows his 7-iron number and guesses the rest, and I have a spec sheet. And by results I am a 22 with a 9-of-11 swing I make some of the time. The distance between my equipment tier and my scoring tier is the widest gap on this page, and no purchase closes it. The swing changes first, then the handicap, and the bag will still be fine when they do.

Where this started

For a few years I owned a house in Lexington, Kentucky, that backed up to the 18th hole of Andover Golf and Country Club, a private club that opened in 1990, a Clyde Johnston design playing just under 7,000 yards with a slope of 134. By the time I lived there it had closed. The fairway behind my house was a retired golf course, which is a strange and wonderful thing to have in a backyard. That is where the thrifting started. Between 2018 and 2023 I worked the thrift stores and estate sales around Lexington, and a town with that many closed clubs turns out to have a lot of good old golf equipment on shelves for a few dollars a club. The Karsten IIIAs came from one of those runs. So did the 5-wood, the Ping bag, the 1-iron, the Kroydon, and most of the museum shelf. A left-handed set of matched 1980 Pings is not something you go looking for. It is something you find when you are looking at everything. And one of those finds closed a circle I did not notice until recently: the Ping cart bag still has an Andover member’s tag clipped to it, green horse logo, Todds Road address, est. 1989. When the club closed, its members’ gear scattered into the Lexington secondhand market, and one member’s bag found its way to the person living on the 18th green. I did not just thrift clubs while living on a dead course. I thrifted a piece of the course back.

The Pinemeadow set came earlier, a $100 boxed set off Woot in 2012, which is what I learned the game on. The three clubs I bought for this project are the only equipment I have ever paid real money for. Everything else in the bag was either a deal or a discovery.

The skull on the putter

There is one purchase in this bag that was not made on specs. The PXG Blackjack carries what PXG calls the Darkness Insignia on its sole, a skull with the number 26. It honors Bob Parsons’ service as a rifleman with the 26th Marine Regiment in Vietnam. I knew that before I bid, and it mattered.

My father, James Earl Baker, served twenty-one years in the United States Marine Corps and retired as a Gunnery Sergeant. I was born at Camp Pendleton, which is where the Marine Corps Test Unit that invented force reconnaissance doctrine was folded into the 1st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion in July 1957 and re-designated, the next day, as 1st Force Reconnaissance Company. My father taught me about Force Recon the way some fathers teach baseball. In his telling they took the missions the Navy SEALs did not, and the record is at least this generous: Recon Marines were developing clandestine insertion methods before the SEALs or the Green Berets existed. I carry that into work. The research lab I direct at USC is the Network Reconnaissance Lab, NetRecon, named for FORECON. We move critical data through networks that are intermittent and hostile to vulnerable people who need it. Reconnaissance, in the sense he meant it.

So here is the coincidence I found while checking the history for this page. In 1966, First Battalion, 26th Marines was activated at Camp Pendleton, and a Force Recon platoon was assigned to deploy with it to Vietnam. The regiment on the sole of my putter was stood up at the base where I was born and went to war alongside the unit my lab is named after. I bought the putter because it fit my wingspan and my stroke, and it does. But I bid on it because of the skull. Every putt I make is on a club that honors a Marine, held by the son of one. The driver is named Barry, after its headcover. The putter is named Gunny.

Why my bag tells the better story

1. Money. Your fitting bought about four yards a club at something like $100 to $200 a yard. My bag would sell for more than I paid. One of us made an investment. The other made a donation to a marketing department.

2. Scoring. From 85 yards in, our bags are the same technology: a current sand wedge and a premium mallet. A 22 handicap leaks eight to twelve strokes inside 100 yards. That is where the $492 I spent on this project went. Your fitted long irons will look wonderful on the two par-5s where they matter.

3. Fitting. I got fit too. Putter length to a 6'5" wingspan, driver flex to my measured swing, wedge gaps in six-degree steps, and every job assigned from a logged baseline. Then I measured the swing itself and found the real problem, and it was not equipment. The analyzer says I already own a 9 of 11 swing. I just do not make it every time. Nothing on your side of the table fixes that either. Fitting is measuring. It does not require a launch monitor and a latte.

4. The story. A factory-matched Karsten IIIA set from around 1980, the model Ping built for left-handers when the flagship was not offered in left hand, rare enough that even Ping has no spec sheet for it, found while living on the 18th hole of a closed Kentucky course, under a Ping driver forty years younger, beside a skull-stamped putter named Gunny after the Gunnery Sergeant who raised me, and a driver named Barry after a plush parrot. Your bag matches. Mine has a plot. Nobody at the 19th hole asks to hear the story of an invoice.

“I own about 87 percent of your bag’s performance for about 20 percent of its price, all of its short game, and the only origin story worth telling. See you on the tee. I will be the one asking what you really hit into that last green.”

Karsten lofts are sourced from the Karsten I spec sheet (see also this breakdown and this measured set) and the Eye 2 specs, wood lofts from a machine-measured Karsten wood set, and all are still pending a loft machine of my own. Measured yards are from 18Birdies. Prices are from live listings and completed sales.