Stephen Malbon couldn’t believe it. Nor could one of the clothing designers for Malbon Golf, the fast-growing, chic apparel brand he founded in Los Angeles in 2017. Jason Day, a former world No.1 who starred for adidas and Nike in different stints, was in the hotel room they’d hired in Naples, Florida, to be fitted out in his new Malbon gear.
It was December 11 last year and Day had just teamed up with LPGA Tour superstar, New Zealander Lydia Ko, to win the Grant Thornton Invitational mixed event a day earlier. Day had been with Nike for six years, but in 2023 his contract was up. Still, Malbon didn’t think it was possible to land Day as their first ever tour ambassador.
“Jason, to me, is like Tiger Woods,” Malbon tells Australian Golf Digest. “I didn’t think it was doable. But I was told [by a friend in the industry] no, Jason loves fashion. He’s f–king cool as s–t and that we should talk to Jason.”
They did, and once Day’s long-time manager, Bud Martin, secured the partnership, it was time to try on Malbon Golf’s wide variety of fabrics and styles, from classic golf polos to more edgy baggy pants, retro sweaters and bucket hats. “My designer said, ‘Stephen, I looked at Jason online and I don’t think he’s going to wear any of this stuff.’ She had only seen him wearing tight, Dri-Fit clothes.”
Day, though, immediately took Malbon’s vibe. He looked over to Martin, and said, “Yeah mate, we’re going with the baggy look from now.” And, as Malbon recalls, “That was it; end of story!”
And so Day continued a years-long transformation that has seen him rebuild his swing, his on-course look, feelings towards the Olympic Games and, he hopes, his reconnection with Australian golf fans.
NEW LOOK, ATTITUDE
The hotel room fitting was Malbon’s first time meeting Day, the Queenslander who is based in Ohio and who had captivated Malbon and his wife Erica, both avid golfers. The couple loved his journey to the top of the golf world, where he spent 51 total weeks, and the dramatic fashion in which he’d won 13 PGA Tour titles – including a maiden major at the 2015 PGA Championship at Whistling Straits.
“Within three minutes, I felt like I’d known Jason my whole life,” Malbon says.
Stephen and Erica Malbon founded Malbon Golf in 2017 on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. The store quickly became popular for its classy execution – concrete floors, indoor putting green and simulator, and clothing lines that danced the line between hipster and ‘bougie’. Malbon Golf pays tribute to traditional golf attire, with polos and plaid pants golfers would happily wear at Cypress Point or Winged Foot, and with collaborations with respected golf brands like Jones bags. Malbon Golf also pushed the boundaries of golf apparel with bucket hats, vintage sweaters and baggy pants. For years, golf had spent years obsessing over tight, figure-hugging athletic apparel. Malbon’s profile was certainly helped when celebrities like NBA legend Steph Curry, a scratch golfer, or popstar Justin Bieber would be seen wearing a piece of Malbon gear. Legacy streetwear brands like Nike, Puma, Champion and Imperial hats, were scrambling to collaborate with Malbon. As were golf brands like Callaway and even designer fashion labels like Jimmy Choo.
Malbon has a slick and cool social media presence one would expect from founders who had built companies that require both. Erica created The Now, a boutique spa and massage parlour with several locations, while Stephen founded Frank151, a street-style magazine and creative agency. Malbon’s Instagram caught Day’s eye over the years, while his “younger” friends also introduced him to the brand.
Conversely, Malbon warmed to Day for his honesty even before they’d met. Day, now 36, has spoken openly about his struggles with injuries, illness and confidence. After capturing his 12th PGA Tour win in 2018, the Beaudesert golfer, who is now based in Ohio, didn’t win for another five years. His ranking plummeted from No.1 in early 2017 to 175th in October 2022. In his dominant prime, from 2010 to 2017, Day was, at times, mocked among golf fans online for that same honesty. He would talk freely to the media about his illness – in 2014 it was reported that Day had suffered sinus and flu-like colds seven times. On the injuries front, Day had a history of withdrawals from the PGA Tour events. In 2019, he spoke about balloon therapy for his chronic back ailments. He would blow into a balloon for 30 minutes, twice a day, because his trainer had prescribed it to align his rib cage with his shoulders and hips. It made Day the butt of jokes on golf corners of Twitter, but Malbon loved it.
“Jason is the nicest guy ever; he seems cool to me because he’s comfortable in his own skin,” Malbon says. “I like that he’s vulnerable and talks about the heartaches and pain, as well as the victories and triumphs. He’s not a robot when it comes to speaking about his life, and of course, he has had hard times like we all have. But a lot of times, tour players don’t speak about any of that stuff, and they’re so robotic. Young people want vulnerability, and they want honesty. Jason has a heart of gold, and [we admire] how hard he grinds and practises.”
It’s easy to understand how Day was the perfect player to introduce Malbon to the professional tour side of golf. It had already skyrocketed in popularity among social golfers in the US and around the world. At the Sentry tournament at Kapalua, Hawaii, in early January, Day turned heads when he walked onto the practice fairway in Malbon gear for the first time. He was sporting an olive satin jacket and baggy pants. He may have looked different, but he was loving it.
“I like to wear different cuts and fabrics and I’ll often send Stephen pictures of [Ben] Hogan back in the [1950s], wearing a linen shirt with big, wide sleeves and big, baggy pants [as inspiration],” Day tells Australian Golf Digest. “I told Stephen from the beginning, I would like to wear cashmere stuff in the wintertime and I’d also love to wear linen in the summer, among other things.”
Most of Day’s outfits this year have garnered significant attention, notably at the Masters in April. For the opening two rounds at Augusta National, Day was grouped with his friend and mentor, five-time green jacket winner Tiger Woods. Naturally, the sporting world’s focus was firmly on Woods’ group. On the Friday, Day wore a sweater vest with “Malbon Golf Championship” stitched across the front. Augusta National officials asked him not to wear it again, presumably because it was depicting another golf tournament, albeit a fictitious one. The vest, and subsequent request to remove it, was a lightning rod on social media and became arguably the biggest golf story in the first two days of the Masters. Malbon says it was in no way planned.
“First of all, I thought it was going to be hot, muggy [in the US South during their spring],” he recalls. “We picked stuff out of our spring/summer collection and scripted him, but it wasn’t like we made that sweater specifically for Augusta. He got paired with Tiger. That intensifies everything. I didn’t think the sweater would make it past the driving range because a lot of the times he warms up on the range in a sweater then takes it off and puts in the golf bag because he’s too hot. I think it got blown out of proportion. Augusta asked him to take it off and he said, ‘No problems, mate.’ It’s their club, their rules and we’re very respectful. We just wanted to get back to watching him play golf.”
Day looking unlike any other tour pro has become the norm, in a good way. He looks dapper and is creating more conversations about golf online. At the Wells Fargo Championship in May, Day bore resemblance to James Bond when he played a tournament round in a buttoned-up shirt with olive stripes and tucked it into baggy, linen pants with a brown belt. He topped off the outfit with ultra-cool sunglasses that completed his movie-star appearance.
“The guy looks like he’s walking through Monte Carlo looking to get a cup of coffee somewhere,” Malbon says with a laugh. Malbon’s image always comes back to golf, though. Its logo is a golf ball with eyes, while Day’s sunglasses have miniature golf tees in the top left and right corners of the frame. “We’re a company who all live and breathe golf,” Malbon says.
While Malbon is yet to truly take off in Australia, there are plans to have more of a foothold Down Under. In the US, it’s common to see Malbon worn by fashion-conscious teenagers at driving ranges and municipal courses from Los Angeles to New York. Malbon says his company’s mission is for the individual to celebrate their true personality.
“With the traditional golf world, sometimes if you’re not dressed exactly like every other person on the driving range, [you get sideways looks],” he says. “When I met Jason and Bud, I quoted one of my favourite lines by [the late Nirvana singer] Kurt Cobain to them. I said, ‘Cobain once said, “You laugh at me because I look different, but I laugh at you because you all look the same.”’ You can be whoever you want to be and still love golf; you don’t have to fit into a box. You can be a surfer or an artist or a musician who plays to a scratch handicap. If you’re a golfer, you don’t have to lose your identity and become just a golfer. For sure, respect the traditions of golf, tuck in your shirt at a country club if that is their rule, but be yourself and be proud of that.”
Day takes it a step further. At tournaments, he frequently dresses how he feels about his game at a particular moment, or how he’s trying to feel. “If I’m not playing that great, I’ll wear something adventurous like a terrycloth shirt and big, baggy linen pants [to create some energy for myself],” Day says. “Sometimes, I’ll want to wear more traditional golf clothes, like a polo and pants. Sometimes I want to feel more relaxed – like at the PGA Championship at Valhalla, I wore [what looked like] gym clothing. It depends on how I’m feeling.”
Ultimately, though, he’s a tour pro and results are at the front of his mind. “Yes, we’re trying to build a golf brand, but the only way for me to do that, as a tour pro, is to play good golf,” Day says. “I need to make sure I take care of business first.”
SWING STRUGGLES
To a large degree, Day has taken care of business. And the first order of business was overhauling his golf swing four years ago. It got worse before it got better; in late 2022 Day had plummeted to No.175 on the world ranking. This was a guy who spent 47 consecutive weeks as No.1 from March 2016 to February 2017. This was a guy regarded as arguably the best putter on tour from 2010 to 2016 and was one of the longest off the tee. This was a guy who contended in majors; Day posted 13 top-10s in majors between 2011 and 2017, including four runner-up finishes and a PGA Championship win. There was a price to pay, though. Plaguing Day the entire time were lower-back injuries that forced those WDs. He believed the injuries were related to the habits he had developed in the golf swing. He lost confidence in his putting by extension. As his personal life saw complications, he also lost his footing in life.
Day’s mother, Dening, was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, and eventually died in March 2022. She was Day’s rock who had re-mortgaged the family home when he was a teenager to afford to send him to Hills International School, where his game flourished. In late January 2022, Day’s feeling of purpose came to a head at the American Express event in the California desert, where he took a wrong turn on his way home, couldn’t find the correct directions and simply pulled the car over. “I just sat on the side of the road looking at the mountains for like 30 minutes. Because it felt like no matter what I did, I was just turning the wrong way every single time,” he said. “I was struggling with my body. Struggling mentally. Struggling with my mum passing. Struggling with a lot of things.”
The new swing had taken two years to feel comfortable in competition. After meeting with a variety of different coaches at the end of 2020, Day paired with swing coach Chris Como, who coached Woods, among others. The mission was to build a golf swing that would protect his back and help him swing pain-free. Day’s swing – which must be noted helped get him to world No.1 and win the Players, a major and FedEx Cup playoffs events – was at times critiqued by coaches and commentators for having a lateral shift on the backswing that would force compensations on the downswing.
“The first year was more about learning about his body and getting the body motion right as a priority,” Como says. “There have been some pretty big changes, but not trying to do too much too fast, either.”
One of the biggest early changes the pair made was trying to increase the mobility in Day’s hips. In his prime, Day actively maintained a lot of flex in his right leg, which minimised his hip turn as he turned his shoulders on his backswing. On the downswing, Day fell into a bad habit of moving his hips ever so slightly in an attempt to shallow the cuts and prevent high, spinny fades – a move most know as “early extension”. Both put pressure on his lower back. Day’s body these days feels better as he continues to try to feel the club dropping more inside him on the downswing and turning aggressively with his body through impact. When he does that, he reduces the spin on his driver, and prevents the occasional high, spinny shot that he used to lose to the right.
The work began to pay off towards the end of 2022, including the Shriner’s event in Las Vegas where he finished T-8. In the first half of 2023, he earned five top-10s on the PGA Tour, before the Masters, and a month after Augusta, a drought-breaking victory at the Byron Nelson event in Texas. He also earned a career-best Open Championship result, a joint runner-up to Brian Harman in horrendous weather at Royal Liverpool. In 2024, he’s had four top 10s and finished T-13 at the Open Championship at Royal Troon.
FEELING NOSTALGIC
Day would be the first to say his comeback won’t be complete until he wins a validating second career major championship. After all, he has runner-up results in all four majors in addition to his lone victory. There have been milestones that signify he is well and truly on his way back. The first was his ascension back to being the top-ranked Australian male golfer, at world No.29. That brought qualification into the 2024 Olympics last month. He was joined by Min Woo Lee as Australia’s two-player men’s team at Le Golf National.
Day’s enthusiasm to tee up wearing the green and gold in Paris came as a surprise to some who remembered he skipped the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro – where golf returned to the Olympics as a sport after a 112-year absence – due to his concerns over the Zika virus in Brazil. He was the world No.1 at the time and, along with other high-profile withdrawals over Zika, dented the relevance of golf in Rio.
“Looking back on it, I should have just sucked it up and gone down and played,” Day said in Paris, where he shared ninth place. “I think in that case it would have been a great experience for me to go down there and represent something that’s bigger than you.”
But Day was also suffering from burnout after whirlwind 2015 and 2016 seasons. He won a maiden major at the 2015 PGA Championship, among a flurry of other titles including the 2016 Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass. “The signing of autographs. The pulling of different directions from your team, your family, your coaches. Because everyone is pulling at you. After a while, you can only give out so much of yourself,” he said.
Having come through the other side of injuries and a slump, which Day says had him contemplating early retirement, he is in the nostalgic phase of his career. He turns 37 in November. He has five children, of which the oldest, Dash, is now 13.
Day is all but certain to feature on the International team at the Presidents Cup from September 26-29, given he sat fourth on the team standings at the time of writing. The top six on the list automatically qualified after the BMW Championship in August. The 15th edition of the Presidents Cup will be held at the Royal Montreal Golf Club and the underdog International side will be captained by 2003 Masters winner and Canadian hero, Mike Weir. Day has already played on the International team four times (2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017), but pulled out of the 2019 Cup at Royal Melbourne due to injury.
“It doesn’t feel that long ago I was fresh on the team,” Day says. “But these days, I have a different outlook. Especially what I went through with injuries and what I’m still going through rebuilding my game to find that dominant form again. You get to a certain point in your career where you’re very thankful for the opportunities you had. I feel grateful to have represented Australia at the Olympics, but also part of the International team in Montreal.”
Day realises he is closer to 40, and thus closer to the final years of his PGA Tour career than he is to the beginning. His career started when he turned pro in 2006 and made five of his first six cuts on the PGA Tour, playing under sponsor’s invitations once he’d moved to the US.
“I know that when I’m old and on my farm [near Westerville, Ohio], that I’ll miss the competitive days,” he says. “The outlook is definitely different now I’m in the second phase of my career. Although I’m hoping I play until I’m 50. There’s a lot of young kids coming out on tour who drive it a million miles and I have to compete against them, but the good thing is, you still have to get the ball in the hole. You need experience and the mental will to win.”
His perspective on returning home to Australia has also changed. His lack of tournament play in Australia has been the biggest gripe fans have had with the superstar. Day hasn’t teed up Down Under since the 2017 Australian Open, and prior to that it was the 2013 Australian Open. He owns up to the lack of homecomings.
“I’m actually a little disappointed in myself, to be honest,” Day says. “I can’t believe it’s been seven years. It’s gone by too quick. A lot of that was injury, and part of it was COVID-19 [and the border restrictions]. Part of it was my mum going through cancer treatments (Dening moved to undergo chemotherapy under specialists in Ohio). Part of it was my family being based in America.”
Day intends to at least play in the Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland, which is less than an hour from his hometown of Beaudesert. The PGA will be played November 21-24, while the Australian Open, once again a mixed tournament, will be held at Kingston Heath and Victoria the next week. It is unclear if he will play both.
“I’m planning on coming home this year because I haven’t been home in a while and my kids haven’t been to Australia,” Day says. “It’d be nice to be able to take my whole family and show them where I’m from. If I play the PGA, it’s not too far away from Beaudesert. I’ll take the family to ‘Beau-ey’.”
While fans are understandably disappointed that they haven’t seen Day more often, he is one of many overseas-based Australian golfers, men and women, who might have found it easier – or at least more enjoyable – if our nation’s biggest tournaments weren’t held at the end of the year. The organisers of Australia’s biggest tournaments – Golf Australia and the PGA Tour of Australasia – do complicate things by having the PGA and Open in late November. It’s right at the time when the US-based players, particularly those with American families, are celebrating Thanksgiving and looking for some time off from competitive golf. This year, for example, the LPGA’s Tour Championship is in Naples, Florida, and concludes only three days before the Wednesday pro-am of the Australian Open on the other side of the world.
Still, Day acknowledges the value of Australian juniors seeing him play domestically.
“I remember going to [the Greg Norman Holden International] at The Lakes in Sydney in 2001, because I was playing a junior tournament and I remember watching Sergio Garcia,” Day recalls of the Spaniard losing to Aaron Baddeley in a playoff. “I had heard so much about Sergio and watching him in person was so cool. I didn’t have any money growing up so I couldn’t ever go overseas and watch these big guys in person. I remember watching Adam Scott at The Grand, just outside the Gold Coast, when we had the Australian Open there in 2001. It was inspiring. I totally understand what golf fans say when they say [to me], ‘Hey man, you need to get home and play.’
“There does have to be a bit of a balance, doing the best job I can on the PGA Tour but also getting home. A lot of people sacrificed a lot of time [with me] in my junior golf days. They gave a lot of time with things like training camps. There are a lot of individuals back home who I’m very thankful for and who helped build my game to come onto a stage like the PGA Tour and represent Australia but also win tournaments. Part of [returning the favour] is to go home, as well. I understand that.”
When he does, it won’t be the same Day fans saw in 2017, or in 2013. This Jason Day has more gratitude and more perspective. But he can still wow the galleries with a brand of golf they have always loved watching.
–Additional reporting Luke Kerr-Dineen
Featured image: Getty images – Jared C. Tilton
