Vice Pro Tan: If Stewart Cink were a golf ball

Vice pays tribute to the bald golfer’s tan with a limited edition that’s strange but totally on brand for Vice.

I’m not saying Vice designed a golf ball that looks like Stewart Cink’s head after 36 holes in the Georgia sun. I’m not saying that. But if someone were to do that—and if that someone happened to be a German golf ball company with a history of making questionable but entertaining aesthetic choices—this is roughly what I’d expect it to look like.

The Vice Pro Tan is a limited-edition Vice Pro finished in what I can only describe as orangish-brown with a white cap. It’s the golfer’s tan, immortalized in urethane. You know the look: burned from the temples down, lily-white under the hat. It’s not flattering in person and it’s not flattering on a golf ball, either. But maybe that’s the point.

Vice’s marketing copy leans into the obsessive golfer angle: “This one’s for the obsessives. The ones who soak up the sun and stay out there a bit too long.” It’s a celebration of the tan line nobody asked for but every golfer has. Or at least every bald golfer has.

Credit to Vice here (I think). The company continues to be one of the few in the golf ball space willing to do genuinely weird things. The Vice Pro Galaxy was cool and fun. This is … well, it’s weird. Whether it’s also fun is entirely up to you and your tolerance for playing a golf ball that looks like it spent too long in a tanning bed with a hat on.

Under the sunburn, it’s still a Vice Pro—a three-piece cast urethane ball that’s been a solid option in the direct-to-consumer space for years. So at least there’s that.

Pricing

Pricing follows Vice’s standard volume discount model: $44.99 for a single dozen, $42.99 per dozen when you buy three and $38.99 per dozen at six. Whether you need six dozen golf balls that look like a dermatologist’s cautionary tale is between you and your wallet.

I genuinely can’t decide if this is brilliant or absurd. It might be both. It’s definitely a conversation starter, and in a sea of white golf balls with slightly different dimple patterns, that counts for something.

The Vice Pro Tan is available now.