Some collections are built to be completed. Others exist to be understood.
The difference is subtle, but decisive. The first seeks closure. The second accepts continuity.
And it is precisely in this second category that the work of Ralph Livingston III belongs, as portrayed in a 2006 article published in A Wee Nip from the Society of Hickory Golfers, a thoughtful and detailed portrait of a man whose relationship with hickory golf was never about possession, but about comprehension.
Behind the unassuming façade of a Midwestern home, Livingston had assembled what the article describes as one of the most significant private collections of Tom Stewart clubs in the world.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hickory-era clubs, accumulated over more than fifteen years. Yet numbers were never the point.
“I like to know what they did, what they were supposed to do,”
Livingston explains in the article.
That sentence alone is enough to understand his approach. Livingston was not collecting artefacts. He was collecting answers.
As A Wee Nip makes clear, Livingston never approached his collection as a finished object.
He was openly reluctant to count it, with the exception of 76 unique Tom Stewart putters: not out of pride, but out of scholarly necessity.
Monetary value, the article notes, was “a crude and arbitrary measure” when applied to hickory-era clubs. What mattered instead was knowledge: understanding how each club related to the course, the ball, the architecture of the game itself.
Tom Stewart, whom Livingston considered arguably the greatest maker of the hickory era, was not revered as a myth but studied as a system. Stewart’s clubs were designed with intent, shaped for specific trajectories, distances, and conditions. Variations were not anomalies but responses — to terrain, to player, to strategy.
As noted in the article, “every club was designed with a shot intent,” a remark shown to reflect Stewart’s almost architectural understanding of golf.
In this sense, the collection functioned less like a museum and more like a working archive: one that demanded constant interrogation.
One of the most revealing moments in the A Wee Nip article comes not from a declaration of achievement, but from an admission of incompleteness.
“Man, I have so much stuff to research…”
It is a disarming line. And a decisive one.
Because it makes clear that Livingston never believed the work was done. The collection, however vast, was still asking questions. And questions, by their nature, require time — often more than a single lifetime allows.
That is where continuity begins.
Over time, significant parts of Livingston’s collection passed to Phil Gibbs, another figure deeply committed to the understanding and preservation of hickory golf. And today, that same lineage continues within Hickory Golf Masters.
Not as an endpoint. But as a new phase.
What moves from one custodian to another is not merely a group of clubs, but a method. A way of looking. A refusal to reduce history to display.
At Hickory Golf Masters, this heritage is not treated as static. It is studied, interpreted, and crucially played. The clubs remain tools before they become objects. Their meaning emerges not from isolation, but from context: from the ground, the swing, the constraints and freedoms of the game as it once was.
Some rare clubs in the collection can be admired only (the most precious ones), other can be seen, touched, feeled and even tried. Some other clubs outside the collection are ready for play and wait to be taken out on the course by enthusiastic golfers. Hickory is a way to honor this game and enjoy it further then most golfers will ever know.
The A Wee Nip article captures a moment when that responsibility was still concentrated in one man’s basement. Today, that responsibility is shared. Expanded. Kept deliberately open.
Because a collection like this does not end when it changes hands.
It ends only when it stops being questioned. And this one, by design, never has.