In Stitches: How logoed golf apparel became such a thing
Course logos didn't appear on golf shirts until the 1970s. Before then it was a radical idea, almost unthinkable, for a brand to embroider anything other than its most valuable marketing asset—its own commercial logo—on a front left breast. But a legendary salesman named Ernie Sabayrac, whose many innovations included convincing club pros to sell golf-specific footwear at a time when most players simply added their own spikes to street shoes, believed a little local flavor might boost sales. He persuaded Vincent Draddy, the executive running Izod Lacoste and later Chairman of the National Football Foundation, to put the renowned alligator on the bench.
For the large middle of golfers who aren’t exactly fashionistas but do put a measure of thought into personal presentation, was there a more important moment in style history?
Nowadays, course logos get stitched onto everything imaginable. For special rounds, the trip to the pro shop for logoed merch has become a tradition nearly as obligatory as 19th-hole drinks.
While some golfers pay keen attention to fabrics, camp collars, rivets, piping, silhouettes and a hundred other design details, the overriding consideration for most of us when getting dressed (beyond what’s clean, unwrinkled) is simply the logo, or even set of logos, to don for the day. No other aspect of golf attire speaks louder. Wordlessly, instantly and rather magically, a course logo can confer where we belong, where we’ve been and, because every course has its own vibe and way of playing, the values about the game we support.
A viral blog from pro-shopper.com once put forth a list of etiquette rules concerning logos, supposedly penned inside the Maidstone men’s locker room, and the tally ran no shorter than 50 commandments. The knowingly pompous tone mostly addressed the wearing of logos of America's 100 Greatest Courses of which one isn’t a member (i.e., don’t wear more than two at once, don’t wear at your lesser-ranked home course if within 50 miles, no “warring tribes” or pairing different logos that feature Native Americans). Such strictures are silly and the domain of elitists with scant else to occupy their minds, but their existence as ideas speaks to our larger fascination about shirts, shorts, belts and raingear with insignia. You’ll be hard-pressed to think of another sport with a semiotic system of equivalent depth.
New courses, as well as courses built a century ago in need of a refresh, recognize this power and are busily investing in graphic design consultants. Seth McWhorter created the logos of Tree Farm and Pinehurst No. 8, among many others. Ian Gilley, the cofounder of Sugarloaf Social Club, counts Pebble Beach and PGA National in an impressive list of clients. Gilley describes himself as a self-taught artist with good taste whose philosophy about golf logos is this: “It should be an image that can work really small and be simple enough that a 4-year-old can describe it,” Gilley says. “The disasters tend to happen when there’s a committee involved with various people trying to cram in founding dates and golf. It’s actually a word-of-mouth benefit when a logo has a bit of mystery and folks ask what it is.”
There’s no doubt that logos encourage golfers to get excited about new clothes. So, as you tuck into Golf Digest’s third fully devoted Style Issue, remember that shopping wasn’t always so easy. Forget online—it was tough to find good stuff even at courses. Until, that is, a handful of apparel companies, Izod Lacoste chief among them, figured out how to tap into our passion.
“Ernie [Sabayrac] pioneered making the relationship between the brand rep and the club pro special,” says Billy Draddy, nephew of Vincent and the man behind his own modern brand, B. Draddy. “For him and my uncle, it was a big gamble, but allowing the pro to put a club’s logo on shirts was a way to really elevate his shop.”
