It looks like he found the right partner. Stephen Malbon and his wife Erica started Malbon Golf—known for its graphic hoodies, roomy fits and distinct script logo—in 2017 after he spent most of his adult years as a graphic designer and creative director. Ahead of the 2024 season, as his brand continued to blossom, Malbon started looking for the right PGA Tour star to rep the M. The requirements: He had to be well-known, well-respected and well-mannered.
Tony Finau, perhaps golf’s foremost sneakerhead, pointed Malbon in Day’s direction. But Malbon, a golf fanatic, couldn’t picture him in anything but body-hugging Nike threads. Once they got to talking, though, it didn’t take long to realize Day was the one. “He was saying that at his house he wears baggy sweatpants and hoodies in the winter and shorts and t-shirts in the summer,” says Malbon. “That’s his life when he’s not on Tour. He was like, ‘I want to be as comfortable on Tour as I am at home.’”
His new identity felt very familiar. “It didn’t take long at all for me to feel comfortable in it,” says Day, who also invested in the company. “It’s so funny, back when I was a teenager that’s exactly the stuff that I wore. Everything was oversized, baggy. I’ve definitely evolved into the look itself.”
If Day made ripples during his first tournament of the year, his Malbon gear made a major splash in April at the Masters. Just ahead of the second round of golf’s biggest major, with Day grouped alongside Tiger, Augusta National officials requested that Day remove his Malbon-logoed sweater vest.
Since it was the Masters, the most revered tournament in golf, Day stuffed it in his bag without any protest. “I didn’t even ask for an explanation,” he says. It did not take long for golf media to cook up all kinds of content about the out of bounds fit. “Vestgate,” as Malbon jokingly refers to the episode, earned the partnership an unfathomable amount of free publicity.
