A Short History of Golf and Golf Hats
Golf as we know it today originated as a game that was played along the eastern coast of Scotland in the Kingdom of Fife during the 15th century. Competitors would hit a pebble around a natural course of sand dunes, rabbit runs and tracks using a stick or even primitive club.
The growth of golf as a well organized competitive sport in the United Kingdom was paralleled abroad in India and the USA. Gate receipts were used as prize money for the very first time in 1892 in Cambridge, England. The first international golf tournament was the Amateur Golf Championship of India and the East in 1893. In 1894, the United States Golf Association was established to oversee the sport in the United States and Mexico.
During the 1920s, the game of golf in the U.S. grew to be an avenue for fashion and golf dress became a requirement. Typical golf fashion consisted of baggy plus-fours in lightweight fabric and extravagant colors, matched with two-tone shoes and a sleeveless Argyle sweater, with accompanying blazer.
Straw golf hats were popularized by Sam Snead and later Greg Norman. Snead was timeless, truly the only player who won sanctioned competitions in six decades, beginning with 1936 West Virginia Closed Pro to the 1982 Legends of Golf, which he won with Gardner Dickinson as his partner. He was legendary for his straw hat and natural swing.
Greg Norman was raised in northern Australia, very close to the equator, and spent most of his time in the bright sun, surfing, fishing and diving. Around Australia, a very popular hat was a typical surfer’s wide-brimmed straw hat. It has a brim that encircles all of your head, including the back of the neck. This is the perfect headwear for keeping the pounding sun away from your face and always keeping you cool. Using this hat when he played golf, Norman was able to keep his eyes focused on the ball while it was sitting on the tee, in flight, and after landing; all without any getting a blinding shot of sunlight in his eyes. At first his mother and father positively detected his straw hat, so much so, that his mother would hide it. She thought straw hats simply weren’t befitting a golfer. In the beginning of his profession, Greg Norman was backed by an Australian hat company, recognized for their large, Aussie cowboy style hats. While on the course, this hat was very hot for him, so the company created the same shape of hat that he cherished in childhood years, but in straw.
In the hot sun, you absolutely must wear a hat to protect you from the bad things a tropical sun can do to your skin. But, just as importantly, your golf hat makes a definite statement about what type of golfer you hope to be. These days, the two most popular types of golf hats seen on the course are the straw hats, such as Greg “The Shark” Norman wears, or the more plebeian baseball caps. A minority of players wear the floppy brimmed hat that was first made popular by Christopher Robin.
The psychological benefits resulting from selecting a straw hat are two-fold. To begin with, it will give you the sense of becoming uncommonly adventuresome; especially if you bend the brim into an acceptable imitation of the one Crocodile Dundee wore. Extra enhancement may be achieved by inserting such things as a feather into the hat band creating a James Bond presence of casual elegance. Also, I would add, most men find ladies wearing smart straw hats becoming a definite distraction that could be worth several strokes to them during the course of play.