Golf drops pants, embraces shorts

The PGA Championship says it will allow shorts in practice rounds—could a cargo shorts crisis be coming?

It reached 70-degrees in New York City this week, which meant this town’s winterweary residents lost their minds. Wool coats stayed home. T-shirts came out to play. People dined outside — oh, excuse me, al fresco — looking like merry elephant seals on the docks.

Then again, New Yorkers will dine outside when it’s 38-degrees out. It’s the weirdest thing.

The one move you didn’t see a lot of was men wearing shorts. Men in shorts continue to get a terrible rap. The designer Tom Ford has declared that shorts should never be worn by men except to swim or play tennis, which feels pretty strict, Tom Ford. The Journal itself has piled onto the anti-shorts brigade, last summer campaigning against what it believes to be the ghastly national epidemic of men wearing cargo shorts.

Meh. I’m OK with men in shorts, even cargo shorts, which are fantastic for carrying your keys, plus a half-eaten turkey sandwich, and a lost box turtle.

And you know who else is increasingly OK with men in shorts? Fuddy-duddy old professional golf.

This week the PGA Championship announced that it will let players wear shorts in practice rounds, a sensible and overdue step that will almost surely wind up with sanctioned shorts in televised rounds that count. This follows the lead of the European Tour, which already allows its players to wear shorts in practice, because, of course, they’re European.

I’ve never understood the objection to shorts in pro golf. Are they really so bad? Is the male leg that objectionable? Or suggestive? Are there people within the sport who believe that legalizing shorts is a slippery slope, one that will lead to untucked shirts in golf, then collarless shirts in golf, and then shirtlessness in golf, and then Speedos in golf, thongs in golf, and then, eventually, nude golf ?

Is that what this is really about? A fear of nude golf ? How prudish. We have nothing to fear! The pros are ready. After all, golf has experienced a vanity surge in recent years. Gone are the days that the only six-packs pro golfers sought were Schlitz. The new generation of players are generally fit and lean, some of them even in possession of defined abdominal muscles. Those guys are probably excited to get to the gym and do squats and calf raises.

I suspect a lot of the hostility toward shorts in golf has been promoted by a secretive but powerful special interest group: Big Khaki. I bet if you looked into it, you would find that Big Khaki has spent many millions pushing golf pooh-bahs to preserve its long-panted grip on the game.

Follow the money. And the pleats. I think Big Khaki’s cotton fingerprints are all over this.

Aren’t we living in a moment in which golf is shedding relevancy? I keep reading that the sport is desperate to attract viewers and participants. Golf courses are doing everything imaginable to incentivize young people to play. They’re installing discos on tee boxes and Russian kettle-bell classes on fairways and even employing elfin robots to gently roll your approach shot onto the green when you’re not looking. OK they’re not doing any of that, but they are allowing shorts.

It’s just common sense. President Trump’s own golf course up here, Trump National in Westchester, N.Y., permits shorts, so long as they are “no shorter than two inches above the knee.” If you belong to a club that makes you wear pants instead of shorts, I’m telling you right now: Your club is too strict, too expensive, and probably smells like old money and Aqua-Velva.

Golf is starting to calm down about being so rules-y. This week, the United States Golf Association and Scotland’s Royal & Ancient announced a set of adjustments designed to make the sport move more fluidly. Among them: allowing players to remove a ball from a bunker (with a two-stroke penalty), and getting rid of the penalty for a ball that moves accidentally on the green. There are a handful of moves to accelerate play, including allowing players to keep the flag in the hole while putting, and slashing the time for looking for a ball from five minutes to three.

These are all positive steps, not just for the pros but weekend hackers. That said, good luck penalising your buddies for taking more than three minutes looking for a ball.

I do appreciate the internal battle within golf: At what point do these concessions and rule changes start to take away from what makes golf, you know, golf? I’m sure there’s grumbling from the old-school: let players remove a ball from a bunker, keep the flag pin in, and the next thing you know, you’re playing Ultimate Frisbee at Augusta National.

(Which would be pretty awesome, actually.)

Historically, and sometimes pathetically, golf has taken forever to catch up to the rest of society, but you can’t stop this march of progress: Shorts are coming, people. Maybe not cargo shorts. I think we’ll see legal marijuana on the PGA Tour before legal cargo shorts. It’s a shame, but I can hold my keys and half-eaten turkey sandwich in my bag, and return the box turtle peacefully to the wild.