A Bad Trend In Golf Shoes

I watched a chick flick called Elizabethtown with my wife the other night (it’s the penance I do for getting time by myself on the course). The movie starts out with an athletic shoe designer who has wasted a billion dollars by creating a hideous monstrostity that no one wants. The company owner said that people would rather go around in bare feet.

The strange thing was that the shoe looked an awful lot like some of the golf shoes I’ve seen lately on the walls of my local Golfsmith.

It’s a disturbing trend in golf shoes: they’re turning into basketball shoes—overblown, overdesigned and garish. Many of the latest designs would look more at home on the feet of an overly tattooed NBA thug than on a golf pro.

Exhibit Number One: The NIKE Shox

It’s bad enough that its running shoe design makes it incompatable with anything I can wear at my home course (where jeans and athletic pants are forbidden). Wearing sneakers with pleated Dockers just makes you look like Bill Gates. The worst part though, is the bizarre red shock absorbers that make it look like a kid’s toy. My son has a toy truck with similar struts.

The Shox is just one example of many in Nike’s stable of shoes.

My other gripe involves the shoes with the massive Swooshes. It is as though the swoosh itself improves your game.

Exhibit Number Two: The Footjoy LT Series

I already pegged these monstrosities with the Ridiculous Golf Item of the Week tag. It’s a shame how far a classic company like Footjoy has fallen. The cheap looking plastic girdle on the shoe is supposed to be a “TPU Support Cradle.” Ok. I know what’s going on here. The TPU Support Cradle is the major selling point, so they’re going to make it stand out as much as possible so you don’t miss it.

They convinced me. I’ll take a pass.

Exhibit Number Three: ADIDAS Tour 360 Black / Black / Silver

At first glance, the Adidas Tour 360 also looks like another logo bloated basketball shoe wannabe. But as it turns out, the three stripes actually are a trademark design feature that harkens back to Adi Dassler’s first athletic shoes. What has been stylized as stripes are actually designed to support the mid section of the foot. So they get a pass on this one.

I’d still like to see a pair with somewhat less emphasis on the stripes.  I liked the look of the Adidas golf shoes with the three stripes on the heel-rear of the shoe. (BTW, Mrs. Golfblogger has been looking over my shoulder on this one and tells me that I am wrong about these shoes. She thinks the stripes look fine.)

Still, Adidas has gotten in trouble over these stripes in another arena: tennis. It seems that under Wimbledon’s rules, manufacturer logos are limited to four inches. Adidas’s tennis division produced clothing where the entire color scheme revolves around three stripes. The shirt is the logo. Wimbledon has banned them, and Adidas currently is suing over the restrictions.

It’s not like these companies are incapable of producing a shoe with a more refined look. We know that FootJoy can do it. And I really like the look of these from Adidas:

Here we have a plain brown, dress style shoe. The Adidas logo is tastefully woven into the side of the shoe, preventing it from looking like a NASCAR vehicle. (If you click on the picture, it will take you to the Golfsmith site and you can get a better look.)

Now, to be fair, I’m sure that all of these basketball style golf shoes above are great from a functional point of view. But why can’t they install these features, and integrate them into a classic looking shoe?

I’ll tell you why: because the marketers want you to be able to tell what someone is wearing from four fairways over.

After his spectacular failure, the guy in Elizabethtown tried to commit suicide by taping a knife to the handlebars of his power dual action exercise bike He was going to turn the bike on high speed, and then the handlebars would plunge the knife into him dozens of times rapidly.

I just hope that the designers of these shoes are forced to fall on virtual swords.