My golf obsession: One author’s abiding affection for a quality golf shirt

Ed. note: Too many ball markers? Closet overflowing with training aids? Never met a par-3 course you could say no to? There are hundreds of golf obsessions out there, each more fascinating (and incurable?) than the next. For a new GOLF.com series — we’ve dubbed it My Golf Obsession — we’ve asked our staffers to opine on their golfy habit they just can’t seem to kick… for better or for worse.

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I am not comfortable using the word obsessed in this context, but I do have an abiding affection for golf shirts with pockets and hard collars. I came of age in them, in the 1970s. (The snap above is from 1978, caddying in the club championship on the public Bellport, L.I., links.)

The actor Beth Hurt (once married to the actor William Hurt) says people dress from the period in which they were happiest. I don’t think that’s true, but I am drawn to the clothes that I wore when the world was more mysterious to me. More mysterious and more exciting. I think these shoes I’m wearing on that August day might have kilties on them, a short leather flap that covers one’s laces. (Laces were more modest then.) The polyester golf shirt, so in fashion now, is a triumph of marketing. They are hideous. I like a cotton shirt, with, as noted, a pocket, a placket with four buttons and a hard collar that does not look like wavy bacon.

Peter Millar used to make just that and it was fine although the collar was too small, the cotton quality was inconsistent and the price was a scandal. Still, I bought many. Pete Dye ordered his hard collars from Pete Millar. A company called Ahead made them too and Arnold Palmer had hundreds of them, Ahead shirts with his umbrella stamp. That ship has sailed. Ditto for HC cotton shirts made by Slazenger, Pickering, Sahara and others. I have resorted to eBay. It’s a crap-shoot and an obscene waste of time, trying to find new ones. I’ve learned the phrases “dead stock” and NWT (new with tags) and NWOT. One arrived the other day, pink, Seminole logo, so foul with use I wouldn’t even mail it back. Would be unfair to the next person. But when I get the right one, all is right in the world. It’s 1978 again. I’ve got the car for Saturday night and a job for Sunday morn.

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