ARDMORE, Pa. — Jack Davis owns about 70 golf shirts bearing Merion Golf Club’s familiar wicker-basket-and-scotch-broom logo and maybe another 30 pieces of outerwear emblazoned with the emblem. His Merion hat tally? Anyone’s guess.
“Even for us, we’re not desensitized to it,” Davis said Tuesday afternoon here in the pro shop at Merion, which this week is the host site of the 126th U.S. Amateur.
Us is the staff that runs Merion’s charming, chock-full-o-merch golf shop (Davis is the director of golf), and it is the intoxicating lure of one of the game’s most iconic logos. They’re a funny old thing, golf-club logos — most are uninspired and forgettable, some are serviceable and then there are the precious few that break through the clutter: distinctive marks that are immediately recognizable, to golfers and sometimes even non-golfers. Sleepy Hollow (headless horseman). Maidstone (spouting whale). Augusta National (no description needed). Beauties all of ’em.
Merion’s stamp is in the same pantheon. In the foreground: a red-and-white striped stick topped by a red wicker basket. Behind it: a clump of scotch broom (green with specks of yellow). Clean, intriguing, symbolic. “It really captures what’s unique about the golf-course experience,” Davis said. “We’ve got wicker baskets on the golf course instead of flags. And then we have the scotch broom. In May, I actually see that picture: It pops and it’s yellow and it’s amazing.”
Bill Kittleman, the former longtime golf professional here, is credited with conjuring the design sometime around 1970. As the story goes, he was gazing out the window of the golf shop (Davis can relate) when a wicker-basket stick and burst of scotch broom caught his eye. A signature Merion scene, he thought, and one that could and should be emblemized. And so it was.
The logo, or components of it, are everywhere this week at the Am: on signage on the course; on napkins in the dining rooms and hand towels in the bathrooms; on the step-and-repeat in the media center; carved into the wooden door of the archive room. The barkeepers at the Wicker Bar next to the first tee, where three wicker sticks are affixed to the wall, pour cold beer into wicker-branded mugs out of wicker taps.
Of course, nowhere is the wicker-fication of Merion more pervasive than it is in Davis’s pro shop. Polos, pullovers, visors, ball marks, prints, bottle openers, leather footballs — all wicker’ed up.
For $45, you can go home with a replica of the logo’ed ceramic mugs in which suds are served at the Wicker Bar. “When I was interviewing here, I asked, ‘What’s the club drink?’” Davis said. “There really wasn’t an answer. It was like, ‘Whatever’s served in this mug.’ It’s representative of your experience because there’s a good chance after you’re round, you had a really nice, ice-cold beer in one of those mugs. People love the mugs.”
But not just the mugs.
Joshua Ryan, the 23-year-old Philadelphia-area native who backed up his opening 67 at Philadelphia Country Club on Monday with a 65 at Merion on Tuesday to secure medalist honors here at the Amateur, visited the Merion golf shop on Friday. When he exited, he’d added to his wardrobe a hoodie, three or four hats and a $175 Smathers & Branson needlepoint belt, all bearing the Merion logo.
Where would Ryan rank the emblem?
“Top tier,” he said. “Here’s good. Seminole’s good, Pine Valley, Oakmont. I mean, it’s gotta be top three for me.”