There are two kinds of style on the PGA Tour. There are guys with stylish swings and guys with stylish clothes.
Then there’s Justin Leonard.
What can you say about a guy who, when he visits New York City, takes his wife and children shopping on Fifth Avenue.There’s the Leonard family now, loaded down with a pile of bags!Justin (not Tiger, Sergio or Adam Scott) is the last golfer to appear on the cover of the New York Times’ Magazine men’s fashion supplement, and all those years he wore Polo Ralph Lauren on the golf course, he looked as good as (probably better than) anyone Ralph could have booked from Ford or Wilhelmina.
Leonard wears Nike now, surely the silky performance polyester that is Nike’s best mix yet of aesthetics and athletics. And when he won Sunday in Memphis he showed himself possessed of those same boyish good looks that made the old Polo Golf foursome (along with Tom Watson, Davis Love III and Jeff Sluman) from the mid 1990s look like Opie, Beaver, Dennis the Menace and Timmie (from Lassie).
In fact, those lush and toothsome ads were the essence of Polo Golf being on its game. The commitment in advertising and promotion, or the business for that matter, probably hasn’t been as strong since and who could fault Nike for pursuing a player with Leonard’s flawless image. Like the other three (Watson and Love still wear Polo), has this guy ever done anything less than uphold the highest standards of sportsmanship. (That’s a rhetorical question.)
Going back to the original paradigm: stylish swings and stylish clothes, Leonard simply carries himself with style. (His swing is not picture perfect, but idiosyncratic what with that exaggerated flat-plane finish.) Somehow win or lose, I still think you get the same firm handshake on the 18th green from Justin.
With Sunday’s victory, the twelfth of his career including the 1997 British Open, he’s probably borderline for the Golf Hall of Fame, which is going to have to revise down the victory numbers for guys in the Tiger Era. (But hey, if Justin’s not in the Hall, his dentist ought to receive honorable mention. Those chompers are killer and that is one Texas-sized smile.)
He’s now ranked high enough to earn a spot on the U.S. Ryder Cup team, along with the likes of Kenny Perry, Jim Furyk, Tiger and Phil.
That’s great that the team is skewing older. Justin last played in 1997 and, memorably, in 1999 when he sank that bomb of a putt at Brookline. Oh, those were the days. The guys had style and the U.S. actually won the darn thing every once in a while.
