Sticking To The Script

The styles the pros wear will be designed around them—their body proportions, their swings—as well as around the conditions they are likely to face. The players are filmed throughout their swing to obtain digital images from address to follow-through. Their feet are scanned, in the manner of an MRI, to give a digital image that can be used in designing their shoes.

Not all sportswear companies rigorously script their pros. At Polo Ralph Lauren, which dresses several top golfers—including Luke Donald , Davis Love III and Tom Watson—day-to-day scripting is not done, according to David Lauren, senior vice president of marketing, advertising and communications. Polo's sponsored pros are given more latitude in what they will wear on a given day. For the Masters, Donald will be wearing Polo's edgier, more technical RLX Golf collection, including original styles. But the final choices will be his.

At Callaway, which dresses and equips Phil Mickelson , the arrangement is also loose. "Every week he gets garment bags with outfits," says Michele Szynal, vice president of communications at Callaway Golf . "We don't script him on what he wears on individual days." Callaway also dresses Mickelson 's caddie, Jim (Bones) Mackay, who, says Szynal, makes a point of not looking like Mickelson . Unlike other companies, Callaway is not primarily an apparel manufacturer, so its main purpose in dressing athletes is not promoting individual products so much as enhancing the brand. In a way, it is using shirts to help sell drivers.

WHAT DOES scripting mean for the future of golf clothes, for the style integrity of perhaps the most stylish sport of all? The practice is certainly a friend of iconic style, if an enemy of iconoclastic style. It seems to reverse the original trend in golf fashions, when the pros, from Bobby Jones to Sam Snead to Byron Nelson to Ben Hogan—often blue-collar types who started in the caddie yard—emulated the aristocrats of the country club with their starched collars, knotted ties, argyle sweaters, pleated trousers and tweed caps. Now the country-club guy emulates the pros.

Most of all, scripting represents the triumph of function over style. With scripting, the design and look of golf clothes have become almost entirely subsidiary to performance, to the desire to win. As Nike 's Kaufman says of the pros, "They can trust that what they put on is going to enhance the way they play."

Woody Hochswender presents the elements of golf style at GOLF.com.