On a sunny Monday morning in late January, the driving range at The Preserve Golf Club in Carmel, Calif., was a who’s who of celebrities, athletes, producers, influencers, creators and executives.
Ranging from Josh Allen to ScHoolboy Q, Metta World Peace, Harry Crosby, Kader Sylla and Tania Tare, those present were clad in gold, navy and white outfits which included pleated trousers, cardigans, culottes and polos—all pieces from a new limited-edition apparel and footwear capsule from adidas and Malbon inspired by the iconic “Crosby Clambakes” and the fashion around them.
“When you mix that all together, it’s almost like a modern-day ‘Clambake’ in a sense, minus the big Tour players,” Malbon Co-founder Stephen Malbon says.
Begun in 1937, legendary entertainer Bing Crosby started hosting his annual “Crosby Clambake” by bringing together musicians, actors, celebrities and professional golfers for a competition around the sport they all loved.
As much about golf as it was having a good time and uniting the likes of Dean Martin, Paul Newman, Sam Snead, Bob Hope, Jack Lemmon, Ben Hogan and more, the “Clambake” started at Rancho Santa Fe Country Club near Crosby’s home in San Diego before relocating north to the Monterey Peninsula in 1947 after World War II.
The event was then played across multiple courses including Cypress Point Club, Pebble Beach Golf Links and Monterey Peninsula Country Club.
While the “Crosby Clambake” has evolved into the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, adidas, Malbon and the Crosby estate sought for a way to not only pay homage to the event’s early days but also the fashion surrounding it from the 1930s and ’40s as today’s game continues to grow and diversify beyond khaki pants and a polo.
A popular outdoor activity during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, golf’s recent growth has also been fueled by the popularity of emerging fashion brands influenced by streetwear and other non-endemic sources.
“What we’re seeing now in today’s game is that people are more willing to bring their fashion sense from the street onto the course and it’s more welcomed than ever before,” adidas Golf President Jeff Lienhart says. “So people are really able to express themselves through the apparel they’re donning.
“No longer do you have to feel almost uncomfortable with ‘Am I wearing the right thing?’ because you can kind of be yourself, whether it’s wearing hoodies or a collaboration and collection like this. You can really express yourself and be yourself on the golf course. I think that’s one of the welcoming aspects of the game that’s probably new over the last several years.”
Because of this, as well as other factors like increased accessibility through golf-entertainment venues like Topgolf, Five Iron and Drive Shack, golf’s largest customer age segment is between 18 and 34 with 6.3 million on-course participants and another 5.8 off-course-only participants, according to the National Golf Foundation.
Like the celebrities and musicians at the original “Crosby Clambakes,” Malbon believes today’s creative and entertainment communities are key in unlocking golf’s true growth potential.
While golf fans will already tune into the PGA Tour, LIV or LPGA to watch their favorite golfers, Malbon, who launched the brand in 2017 with wife Erica, says non-golfers will be drawn to the game by watching the likes of Steph Curry, Justin Timberlake, ScHoolboy Q, DJ Khaled and Mark Wahlberg playing.
“If you’re a golfer, you’re a fan of the pros and you follow them, but they’re not getting new people who aren’t golfers to pay attention,” he says. “Tiger (Woods) did, obviously, but Rory McIlroy isn’t getting a million people to start playing golf because he wins at Augusta. That’s not going to move the needle the same way.
“My son, Remington, he’s 12, and one of the biggest reasons he plays golf is because Michael Jordan plays golf. Steph Curry plays golf, too. He loves basketball. He loves wearing Jordans.”
That’s why Malbon leverages relationships and collaborations with endemic and non-endemic brands including adidas, FootJoy, Undefeated and Vilebrequin to appeal to new audiences, especially in the creative community. The brand even launched a collection with Curb Your Enthusiasm to celebrate the HBO series’ 12th and final season.
For adidas, working with a lifestyle brand influenced by golf like Malbon helps give the global sportswear giant more “culture credibility,” according to Lienhart, who says the Crosby Collaboration provides another opportunity to “put our brand front and center, show people what we’re capable of and that our brand does have some elasticity.”
Nearly two years in the making, the Crosby Collection was a situation of the stars aligning. adidas was having separate conversations with Malbon and the Crosby estate before the three put their heads and creativity together to pay homage to the legendary entertainer and his iconic event just in time for the 2024 Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
“These collaborations are much like how we treat our athlete partnerships where it’s more quality than quantity,” Lienhart says. “With these collaborations, we don’t want to be doing them nonstop. They have to have meaning and they have to be dropped into the calendar at the right time.
“… It’s always great when you can create this sort of triangulation and can bring multiple parties together to do something because it certainly gives it a little more scale than it otherwise would have had.”
PS: You can shop the collab now at adidas.
Leave A Reply