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THERE GOES THE COUNTRY CLUB
Young. Hip. Stylish. Inclusive. Yup, we’re talking about golf.

Text: CURTIS GILLESPIE

Golf is no longer golf.

This insight comes to me while sitting in the bar of the TopGolf driving range facility in Watford, about a 40-minute drive north of London. TopGolf has a microchip in every ball to track each shot, but this spectacular new technology alone can’t account for who’s there: a Rastafarian wearing a Saville Row suit; three East Indian teens sporting toques and baggy pants; two lads in England soccer jerseys throwing back lager in the bar at an alarming rate.

This is not the face of golf as we have known it.

Until recently, golf was used not just to indicate the actual game but as a handy semiotic signifier. If you wanted to indicate a certain type of person (the stereotype being someone who drove a Cadillac, lived in a gated community and only got close to coloured skin when examining his liver spots), you had to say but one thing: "He loves his golf."

Not anymore. The game is hot. It’s on the A-list. It’s serious-ly cool.

The major influence has been, of course, Tiger. Anyone that young, that talented, that good-looking, is going to have a major cultural impact. But golf is everywhere. Trendy magazines feature it, Zagat guides cover it, P. Diddy plays it and designers cultivate its look. Tiger’s allies in the coolification of golf are emerging along two general streams: the game’s growing revolt against class and privilege; and its stunning emergence in the world’s houses of fashion.

London’s Richmond Park Golf Course is located on the edge of an idyllic bit of English countryside, but the first thing I see there is a little girl wearing pink-bottomed blue jeans and fluorescent pink bunny ears. She’s holding a cut-down putter and agitating her dad to get out on the course. Bruce Cuff, the Richmond Park director of golf, says, "That’s the way it is around here: 12-year-old boys, ladies, seniors, men, whoever. Anybody’s money is as good as anyone’s else’s."

In other words, this is a place where people come to play golf, not to be part of golf and its entrapments: clubbiness, membership, privilege, being above the fray. The fray is in full force at Richmond Park, and it looks like a hell of a lot fun out there.

I had been told to visit Richmond Park by the head of the company Refugees, Pete Gorse (as in the spiky little bush that lurks off Scottish fairways). It’s an appropriate name for a man running a company so intent on reworking the game’s fashion sense that its fabric of choice is denim, which private golf clubs deem more evil than polyester Sansabelt fashion crimes. Refugees creations have even made it into the pages of GQ.

The jewel of the Refugees line is the denim Cheat Pants. "They’ve got a secret pocket with a hole in it," laughs Gorse. "It’s brilliant." The pants’ instructions read: "1. Stand where you want ball to land; 2. Drop ball through hole in cheat pocket; 3. Loiter while ball runs down leg and onto fairway; 4. Try not to look too smug."

Gorse and his team have also lately stirred the pot with the disposable plastic Binbag golf bag and – his personal favourite – a black golf ball. "Okay, it’s harder to find in the rough," Gorse ad-mits, "but it’s easier to see in the air. Actually, it looks like a flying piece of muck."

Traditionalists have taken a vehement dislike to the flying muck, saying that it’s against the spirit of the game. Gorse dismisses the criticism but also admits that the Refugees line isn’t yet directly available in North America for a different reason. "The U.S. is too litigious," Pete offers. "What if someone gets killed by a flying black golf ball?"

The one place a black golf ball might just fly, as it were, is New York. While waiting to meet the editor of a hip new golf magazine at a Chelsea brew pub along Manhattan’s Lower West Side, I’m ap-proached by a tall teenager dressed in fashionable East Village grunge. He holds out his hand and introduces himself as Greg Stogdon, editor-in-chief of Putt. The intelligent and ambitious 24-year-old, who looks like he should be selling popcorn at a movie concession, is leading the vanguard of change in sport and fashion.

Stogdon traces his fashion and design roots back to the Fashion Promotion and Communication program at St. Martin’s School of Fashion in London, also attended by Stella McCartney and John Galliano. In fact, Putt grew directly out of a magazine design assignment. "I’d always played loads of sport and lots of golf. But I was appalled by the look of sports magazines: ugly, ugly, ugly." Stogdon believed "there were lots of golfers out there with style and money and nothing to read." And so he created Putt, an ultrastylish golf magazine, using bright colours, inventive photography and cheeky humour (unlike the recently folded U.S.-based Maximum Golf magazine, which was based more on a beer commercial aesthetic).

He printed 200 copies of the first issue in June 2001 and placed them in select London boutiques, such as Brown’s Focus and Paul Smith. Putt has quickly taken off in the U.K. at the same time that documentarian Les Rowley is completing a six-part golf TV series called Swingers and a show on the changing nature of golf called TV Caddy for Channel 4. Late this spring, Stogdon is bringing the third issue of Putt to the North American audience with a New York-based issue.

After our chat, Stogdon and I stroll north to the Chelsea Piers driving range on Manhattan’s Pier 61. A diverse young crowd is drawn to this four-tier automated range, where the golf ball is teed by a pneumatic device below ground – technology that gives even more ammunition to those who insist golf isn’t a sport: Now they don’t even have to bend over!

But Chelsea Piers is cool. It’s become a popular spot for corporate and singles’ events, though it’s not just Wall Street junk bond traders and East Village boutique owners who are showing up. Asked if the rich and famous were checking it out, a Chelsea Piers employee once said, "Oh, lots. Denzel Washington, Uma Thurman, Brad Pitt. And that English guy that got caught with the hooker."

Back in London, I knock on the door of a stylish flat in Notting Hill that could easily be the setting for a new film by that English actor that got caught with the hooker. The door opens to reveal a tall, shock-haired man who reminds me of a sunflower. "Come in, come in," says Johan Lindeberg in his Swedish-tinged accent. Racks of sleek golf clothing line the walls of his private showroom, the kind of clothing with which PGA players Jesper Parnevik and Charles Howell III are turning heads. I ask Lindeberg about golf’s new look: bright colours, tighter fits and bolder lines. "The whole movement, the modernization of fashion in golf," the designer says, tapping his head, -"started right here."

Prada, Hugo Boss, Versace, Armani, Anna Sui, Evisu – as well as long-time golfwear suppliers such as Pringle, Lacoste, Burberry and Polo Ralph Lauren – have been aggressively creating new golf clothing lines, most of them in step with Lindeberg’s clean close angles. This movement dates back to January 1997, when Jesper Parnevik showed up at the Bob Hope Desert Classic wearing the kind of clothing the PGA Tour hadn’t seen in quite some time.

Lindeberg explains that back in the mid-1970s, golf fashion -wasn’t an oxymoron. Arnold Palmer was dashing – the James Bond of golf – and wore clothes that enhanced his muscular build. But the late ’70s and early ’80s were disastrous to golf fashion. "Everything was so baggy, so lumpy," Lindeberg says, shaking his head like a Michelin-starred chef staring at a Big Mac.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Lindeberg was the creative force behind Diesel jeans. He left in 1996 to create his own line, which now chases the same moneyed, hip customer. To endorse his products, Lindeberg chooses exemplary players with compelling looks and personalities. "We’re doing some hot pants for Catrin Nilsmark right now," he says, smiling at the prospect.

But dressing Jesper Parnevik was Lindeberg’s dream. "I always thought he was a great-looking guy, but he just looked terrible in the clothes he was wearing back then. He looked like Bobby Ewing from Dallas." Lindeberg combined golf, fashion and rock ’n’ roll to create Parnevik’s new look: "It worked. I took Jesper from Bobby Ewing to Steve McQueen."

Steve Muncey is not Steve McQueen, but he wouldn’t mind some of the same sense of cool for his magazine. Muncey is the editor of Bogey, the other U.K.-based entry in the modern golf magazine world. The standard golf article the world over can be defined in one word: safe. Bogey is trying to reach a new market with radically different content and its fresh editorial stance. It has a slightly different aesthetic than Putt, highlighting a maverick attitude over fashion sense, but there is still an ongoing "who came first" debate between the two. (For the record, Putt published first.) "I think we’re going after the golfer more than the designer," says Muncey. "We’re less ironic but still want that modern feel." ("They just copied us," sniffs Charlie Koolhaas, Putt’s assistant editor and daughter of renowned architect Rem Koolhaas.)

One could become immersed in the finer points of this debate, but the larger and more arresting point is this: A group of cool, talented designers, publishers and journalists are actually arguing about golf. Perhaps a moment’s reflection is required to digest this fact.

At the corner of Prince and Green, in the pulsing centre of New York’s SoHo, Johan Lindeberg’s store is reaching out for the soul (and wallet) of the modern golfer. Across from Lindeberg’s showroom is Ferragamo; kitty-corner a café sells four-dollar lattes. Within blocks, Prada, Armani, Burberry and other houses of high couture feature seasonal golf fashions. The makeup of the shoppers seems to reflect something he said in his Notting Hill studio: that the change in golf is not really about being young. "It’s about being modern," he said, chopping the air with his hand for emphasis.

Fashion is now as central to the modern game of golf as handicaps and tee times, but, more significantly, golf is becoming important to the sometimes hermetic world of fashion. Paralleling this trend, there is a growing demographic of golfers who just want to go whack the ball around – to hell with rules, dress codes, formalities and elitism. The game simply is not what it was a generation ago or even five years ago. Amazingly, a sport that used to offer asylum for those guilty of crimes against style and youth is now a testing ground for the hip and subversive.