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What is a golf shoe?
This question is not meant to be a riddle, but in recent years, the line has become intriguingly blurry. From the local muni to the PGA Tour, the variety of looks golfers are stepping into has expanded far beyond what we might have imagined in golf's relatively recent past.
As recently as a decade and a half ago, wearing sneakers on the golf course was a pretty unconventional move, if not quite a faux-pas. It tended to out someone as a likely non-golfer, a beginner or extremely infrequent player at best. Now, after decades of traditional, slow-changing aesthetics, golf-specific shoes have come to look more like sneakers than ever, to the point where it's reasonable to start to wonder whether calling a shoe a golf shoe is just a matter of location, rather than construction.
Golf shoes shed traditional looks
For decades, golf shoes looked fairly similar across the board: heavy, mostly leather construction with sharp cleats made specifically to help anchor the golfer to the ground during the swing. The color palette was narrow: white, brown and black in various combinations tended to be the order of the day.
Back in the day and for many years, golf shoes' cleats were metal; golfers of a certain age still pine for the days when the scratch-clack of nails on concrete or asphalt was the soundtrack around the first tee. But in the 1990s, golf courses across the world gradually blanket-banned the use of metal spikes by amateur players, and the transition to plastic cleats swept through the game. Now, only a handful of touring pros still wear metal "nails," which remain allowed in upper-level tournaments.
It's often difficult to pinpoint where or when certain trends truly begin. Not so in the brief history of spikeless golf shoes: it's the 2010 Masters, where a former champion kicked off a golf shoe paradigm shift. That week, Fred Couples donned a pair of shoes made by the Danish company ECCO, which traded out plastic screw-in cleats for an array of fixed, molded plastic nubs to provide traction. Skeptics furrowed their brows at the site of such casual-looking shoes in one of championship golf's cathedrals.
Couples' choice was no stunt. The then-50-year-old turned back the clock at the site of his only major championship victory nearly two decades prior, shooting an opening-round 66 to take the solo lead. He ultimately finished in 6th place, seven shots behind Phil Mickelson.
By playing so well in otherwise street-legal shoes, the 1992 Masters champ had struck a lasting blow against the perception that in order to play golf properly, one needed to wear traditionally bulky, heavily-cleated shoes.
In this 2020 NBC Sports Golf piece looking back at the 2010 Masters, Couples was quoted as saying, “I’m getting more attention for my shoes than making pars and birdies...I would hit a tee shot on the first tee and I would be halfway down the fairway and people weren’t yelling about my swing, they were yelling, ‘How do I get those shoes?!’"
Nearly 15 years later, Couples' choice of footwear has influenced millions of golfers, and ECCO and nearly every other company that had at one point made golf shoes with cleats now markets spikeless golf shoes galore.
One fascinating case is FootJoy, who for years has enjoyed strong market share in golf shoes and, as part of golf apparel's establishment, is easy to associate with tradition. But even they have managed to adapt; at last count, they offered 21 spiked golf shoe models for men and 13 spikeless ones.
"The percentage of spikeless shoes has had a dramatic shift from 20+ years ago where spikeless golf shoes weren’t a strong consideration for most golfers," said Patrick Trubiano, FootJoy's director of product development for footwear. "Through the last 5 years we are seeing that number still slowly tick up as versatility becomes a priority for some golfer’s closets."
Trubiano noted that among the dozens of professional golfers who are contracted to wear FootJoy shoes, spikeless models have been popular during tournament play, with the ProSL line of shoes rising to the top of a majority of FootJoy pros' preference lists (I have enjoyed dozens of rounds in a pair that I've had for a few years). However, spiked shoes have made a recent comeback, with FootJoy's Premiere line getting more tour run of late. In the end, pro golfers are performance-driven. "Our PGA Tour players trust that our shoes will consistently meet high-performance standards whether spiked or spikeless," Trubiano said.
Performance vs. preference in golf shoes
When it comes to golf shoes, as long as I don't slip all over the place, I prefer to play in whatever feels most comfortable to me. Still, I have largely stuck to shoes that are marketed specifically for golf. Frankly, the golf shoe scene has never been more vibrant in terms of different styles, from small-batch brands to new approaches to traditional looks to sneaker and even streetwear-inspired styles. GolfPass Managing Editor Jason Deegan digs his golf sandals, too.
As if the space wasn't already competitive, now, non-golf brands are making shoes that are well-suited for golf, too. My first strong inkling of this trend came when I was sent a pair by direct-to-consumer brand Xero. Xero is one of a growing cohort of brands that makes "barefoot" shoes, with thin zero-drop soles, wide toe boxes and very lightweight construction. Barefoot shoe advocates argue that since humans walked barefoot for millions of years, the relatively recent advent of heavily cushioned and constrictive shoes has not done our feet many favors.
Without being 100% sure of their claims, I can say that as someone with a wide foot, barefoot shoes can help. Xero's Ridgeway Mesh model has become a trustworthy golf shoe in my repertoire in recent months. It's a barefoot-style hiking shoe that is golf-curious.
Xero does not claim to make golf shoes per se, but their offerings are geared towards runners and hikers, who demand good traction in order to navigate different terrain. These needs align closely with those of golfers. Running (so to speak) with this connection, golfers could greatly expand the universe of shoes they might enjoy wearing on the golf course to several brands that are outsiders to the game.
One of the best golf shoes I've tried more recently is only a golf shoe in the context of this connection. Merrell, a 43-year old brand that started as an offshoot of ski outfitter Rossignol, has never made golf shoes. Or perhaps, because they have always made hiking shoes, they have also made golf shoes, just without promoting them as such. That narrative has changed with Merrell's new Moab Speed 2 trail shoe.
"The reason Merrell got into positioning our trail shoes as golf footwear is simple – our products are built for comfort, traction and durability," said Kenny Weiser, Merrell's senior brand marketing manager. "All of these elements offer the perfect synergy for what you look for in a traditional golf shoe."
The Moab Speed 2 has several traits that any golfer would appreciate, including GORE-TEX waterproofing and quality gripping outsole design courtesy of Vibram, whose materials and treads feature in brands that make footwear for rock-climbing, running, skiing and, indeed, golf.
Perhaps Merrell is piggybacking on golf's recent popularity spike in order to expand their market beyond the relative niche of hikers and bikers. Perhaps they genuinely recognize the crossover between the two disciplines and don't believe golfers or hikers will sacrifice much, if anything, by buying a shoe that tries to be appeal to both groups.
My rounds in my pair of Moab Speed 2 shoes have been enjoyable, and the sneaker-like look makes them wearable off-course, too. At $170 per pair, they are priced competitively with other golf shoes, and their versatility may make them seem a strong value. I used to loathe the way some companies would market their shoes as appropriate both for the golf course and home. Now, I'm not so sure there need to be hard distinctions between golf shoes and non-golf shoes.
With more and more quality shoes like those from Xero, Merrell and other non-golf-endemic brands revealing themselves to golfers, it pushes brands with golf DNA like FootJoy to continue to find ways to tailor performance to golfers.
FootJoy's Patrick Trubiano makes a strong case based around his brand's decades of leadership in the golf shoe category, their resources and R&D capabilities. "We are dedicated to utilizing our top-tier lab and innovative resources to elevate the performance of our spikeless products to continue to push boundaries on what spikeless traction can perform like on a golf shoe," he says.
At the moment, there seems to be no reason to believe the big golf shoe brands are going anywhere. I reckon I will have played the majority of rounds in 2024 in either FootJoy or ECCO shoes, in part because they offer shoes with the BOA System of internal, rather than exterior laces, which I find generally superior in comfort and support. But with apparel taking a noticeably casual turn in recent years, it is also clear that as the game grows, so will the boundaries of golf style.
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