Tiger Woods comes out in support of changing PGA Tour's ancient dress code
For a sport with origins in a country where the traditional menswear from the waist down is a kilt, the PGA Tour has been curiously averse to letting the men who play their events show some leg.
Now, none other than Tiger Woods is challenging that outdated dress code.
In a Facebook Live interview Thursday with Bridgestone Golf, Woods came out in support of allowing the players to ditch the office-on-casual-Friday look that has long identified the pro golf circuit in favor of something more in line with what those same office workers wear to the beach on their summer days off.
“I would love it,” Woods said of changing the dress code. “We play in some of the hottest climates on the planet. We usually travel with the sun, and a lot of our events are played in the summer, and then on top of that when we have the winter months here a lot of the guys go down to South Africa and Australia where it’s summer down there.”
“Also, a lot of the tournaments are based right around the equator so we play in some of the hottest places on the planet. It would be nice to wear shorts. Even with my little chicken legs, I still would like to wear shorts.”
Woods has a bit of history with the PGA over this.
Back when Woods was the only major bankable star that golf had and most fans who tuned in couldn’t name any of the other players, he leveraged his clout to get his then-caddie, Steve Williams, the chance to wear shorts on the course.
At the made-for-TV “Showdown at Sherwood,” a match-play event between Woods and then-No. 1 player David Duval, their caddies wore shorts.
The PGA Tour raised a stink even though it wasn’t an actual Tour event, and while Duval’s caddie eventually complied, Woods stood up for his guy.
When the Tour said that they would ban Williams from caddying official Tour events, Woods shut down that line of attempted discipline brilliantly.
“Guess I’ll be playing in Europe next year,” he said.
Woods doesn’t have that kind of clout anymore; at 42 years old and with his better days behind him, he hasn’t been a major draw for actual competition in years.
But he nonetheless lent his support to the cause.
Meanwhile, the idea of showing leg on the golf course is hardly a matter of propriety; the women of the LPGA have been wearing shorts for years.
And the pants men wear are not the thick woolen trousers those same kilted Scotsmen don in the wintertime in golf’s ancestral homeland. They’re feather-light and designed to both wick away sweat and allow the breeze to cool the wearer as if they weren’t there at all.
But it’s a curious call for gender equity in its own way; if the women can be comfortable in shorts, there’s no reason why the men can’t be too.
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