AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — Jason Day was looking for a new identity with his clothing, having spent his entire career with two of the most famous apparel brands in sport. He wanted something that would make him stand out on the golf course and feel fashionable off it.
He got every bit of that with Malbon Golf last year at the Masters.
Day chose a sweater vest, white with large letters stretching across the front that spelled out “No. 313. Malbon Golf Championship.” He recalls wearing a rain suit Friday morning on the 14th tee as he resumed the rain-delayed first round alongside Tiger Woods and Max Homa.
“Max and Tiger said, ‘That’s kind of boring,'” Day said. He already had been turning heads with his Malbon Golf attire the past four months, most of it baggy, a throwback look in golf.
“I said, ‘Wait until you see what I have on underneath.’ I take my jacket off, and they didn’t know what to say. As I was playing, it got crazier and crazier on social media.”
Maybe a little too crazy for Augusta National. The club determined the logo was a bit over the top and asked that he not wear it that afternoon.
His agent, Bud Martin at Wasserman Media Group, got word — by then it was the talk of the Masters and points beyond — on his way to the course and dreaded the idea of having this conversation in the 30 minutes before Day teed off for his second round.
“I was getting ready to make this speech and he said it was too hot and he wasn't going to wear it anyway,” Martin said.
And then there was Stephen Malbon, who founded the company with his wife, Erica, after a creative art career in subcultures from surfing to snowboards, fashion, graffiti and hip-hop. Behind a passion for design and a newfound addiction to golf, Malbon's brand already was making traction in the golf world. It exploded that day.
Malbon likes to say that “everyone knows who we are, for better or worse.”
This was a little of both.
“It had like 3 billion impressions those two days on the internet,” Malbon said. "Tiger made the cut. You had Bryson (DeChambeau) and the Jesus photo when he picked up the sign and put it on his shoulder. Some other player told one of the patrons to (expletive) off. And the only thing they were talking about was Jason and his sweater.”
That was the better part of it.
The worse was something Malbon is determined to change through his streetwear design.
“Golf is intimidating,” he said. "There was a lot of young people who probably looked at Jason that day and said: ‘Wow, golf might be for me. He looks cool.' And then he gets mocked and ridiculed and teased by all the commentators and then they're like: ‘Nah, I’m not going out there. If they're mean to him, they can be mean to me.'
“The Master is the Super Bowl of golf," he said. "That was a great opportunity to show golf can be different.”
That was Malbon's objective when he launched the brand in 2017 from a studio in Los Angeles. The idea was to make golf more appealing to a younger, style-conscious generation. Day, a 37-year-old Australian who once rose to No. 1 in the world, turned out to be a good fit.
Martin had met Malbon a few years earlier and struck up a relationship. Day's deal with Nike was up (he was with Adidas at the start of his career) and he was looking for options. For starters, he didn't like showing up at a tournament worried that he would be wearing the same scripted clothes as another Nike golfer.
“That's kind of how it happened,” Day said. “I was going to do my own custom clothes and Bud came to me and said, ‘What about this brand Malbon?’ They could do anything for you, any fabric you want, any style ...
