Many pros have, over the years, hardly pursued a sober style themselves: Seve Ballesteros liked a bright pink v-neck,
Shingo Katayama a straw sombreo and studded belt. John Daly characteristically wore trousers that could prompt a
psychedelic experience. Ian Poulter has turned his love of tartan trousers into a clothing line. But then what can
anyone expect when the Masters jacket - introduced in 1937, in a lurid green shade somewhere between shamrock and
parakeet, as fashion types might put it, or mushed cricket and Exorcist vomit as those fortunate enough to in shades
might see it - was designed specifically to make the Augusta National members wearing it stand out to those members
of the public needing assistance. With an upset stomach perhaps.
This jacket aside, look back to the 1950s and golf style was, for most, a much more sedate and obviously stylish
affair. Sinatra might have idolised Bing Crosby, but he didn’t follow his lead on the fairway of fashion. Crosby -
crooner supreme and the man who effectively invented the pro-am game - might have had 75 golf club memberships to
his name, all paid for, but he didn’t let his sporting obsession cloud his easy weekend style, one typically capped
with pipe and fedora or fishing hat. Look to the golfing style of Dan Sanders, Jack Nicklaus or, above all, Arnold
Palmer - the sport’s first real superstars - and it was about taking a more timeless approach too.
Palmer - whose spic-n-span style was something he inherited from his father - believed that orderly dress meant for
an orderly performance, which is why he favoured an almost militaristic exactitude in his clothing: a properly
pressed straight-collar shirt, trousers with centre-crease, polished shoes. “All of those things are, I think, key
to dressing with an emphasis on neatness,” he explained. “Golf is about precision. There’s a relationship between
the player and his dress.”
Not that Palmer thought he had much competition, in panache as much as in play. “[People have said that] I was a
well-dressed golfer,” he once noted. “I guess that has something to do with the fact that a lot of people who play
golf don’t dress very well”. Were Palmer around today, he’d be wearing something akin to Onia’s lightweight terry
polo, or Yuri & Yuri serie yarn polo, with a pair of The Workers Club pleated khaki chinos. Certainly his is a
sobriety that might be coming back into full swing: the resurgent Tiger Woods has his splashes of colour, but has
just as typically been seen dressed in serious monochrome.
That, historically, golf style has been all over the place - sometimes at the pin, sometimes in the rough - is,
arguably, a product of the the fact that there hasn’t been any need to dress in any particular way at all. All
anyone needed to wear in order to play golf was, well, anything they liked. Yes, there were clubhouse rules -
unfathomable, out-of-touch prohibitions against shorts, t-shirts or denim, for example, which only served to
underline the us-and-them mentality of what still remains one of the most class-ridden sports. But, essentially, you
didn’t have to wear specialist clothing of the kind that enabled or assisted play, as most other sports
require.
Indeed, it’s only in recent years that textile advances have seen the advent of golf clothing somewhat designed to
help players up their game - fabrics that stretch or wick moisture, for example, or clothing the likes of
Playbrave’s clever Sebastian polo, cut broad across the chest to aid movement, or GranSasso’s polo in an
extra-breathable 3D knit.
Such advances, naturally, have eagerly been snapped up by all those Sunday players who likewise share the mistaken
belief that owning a £10,000 set of carbon fibre clubs will make them play better, when in fact a Tiger Woods would
still be able to outplay them blindfolded and using a walking stick. But those more honest about their abilities
have rather returned to the wearing of classic cuts in noble fabrics - the likes of a Stenstroms polo in linen, or a
King & Tuckfield one in merino wool - that do the same thing, at least for all those who don’t literally run
around the course. And, let’s face it, most Sunday players couldn’t.
Yet much as they might not agree with Samuel Johnson’s famed dictum that golf is a good walk spoiled, nor should they
think of golf as a good wardrobe spoiled either. Sure, it would be a shame if the clownish pizzazz of latter day
golf style was to be lost altogether - if only to piss off the blowhards of the clubhouse committee - but, as pros
and amateurs alike are coming to appreciate, there are limits. Keep in mind the sage words of that Tiger fella:
“Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like
black pimps”.
Seve Ballesteros, a five-time major champion and captain of Europe's Ryder Cup team, chips through his legs out of a
bunker.
