Fashion poison for golfers
An excellent theme for golf in the wake of the Tiger fiasco is keeping one’s pants secured in place. Equipment required: a zipper, trouser button (or hook) and your belt buckle.
No further discussion would be needed, if belt buckles hadn’t slipped beyond practicality and become—even on the golf course—a means of male self-expression. Look at me, says the wearer, I’m no conformist—I’ve got the honkin’ big, solid pewter, matte finish, skull-and-crossed-clubs belt buckle from Tattoo Golf holdin’ my business together.
Yes, and you look entirely moronic wearing it, dude. There are no choppers in the club parking lot, just your Dodge Stratus and a lot of rides like it. The grill room doesn’t have Megadeth piped in. “Skull” in golf is an ugly missed shot, and let’s leave it that way.
In some cases the the excessive midriff hardware is a garish attempt at intimidation. As in: I have the stones to wear this foolish thing, thus I shall prevail at crunch time in our match. No you will not, say I, on behalf of all the normally belted. Under pressure you shall… buckle.
Then there’s this guy, Chris Foster: http://blog.fosterweld.com/blog/fosterweld/0/0/more-custom-golf-belt-buckles. He’s pretty harmless, in that the buckles he sells are nicely crafted and they don’t make use of golf “motifs,” thank god. Foster just happens to declare that they’re custom-designed for golfers.
By contrast there is a motif mashup of epic proportions going on here:
The clubs, the ball, the golf bag, a single golf shoe, and “GOLF” carved huge—what, no ball retriever?
Anthony Kim is partly responsible, though not actually to blame . That hand-tooled “AK” medallion that pimps up Anthony’s belt earns a pass. Our great white world of golf is better off remembering that Anthony birdied his way out of the streets, and the buckle performs that service. But please think of his case as the exception that proves the rule. And the rule ought to be: No embarrassing belt buckles on the tee.
