One Sunday in March, I stumbled hazily onto my couch, flipped on the TV, and channel-surfed to the final round of The Players Championship. The last pairing of the day was just teeing off. I recognized one half—the event’s eventual winner, world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler—but I’d never seen the other fella before…and also couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was, I quickly learned, Min Woo Lee, the 24-year-old younger brother of two-time LPGA major winner Minjee Lee. And he had the sickest look of any pro golfer I’d seen in ages.
There was his dusty ‘stache, for starters. But it was accented by the mullet splaying out the back of his Callaway cap—visual confirmation of his Aussie upbringing—and the mirrored Oakley wraparounds on his temples. And then, the pièce de résistance: he was wearing a fitted teal short-sleeve mock neck, a.k.a. the most underrated silhouette in golf shirts, which looked so effortlessly cool that even the sponsor logos plastered all over it felt like a shrewd and purposeful design choice.
I became an instant fan. Golf should, in theory, be one of the most naturally stylish sports on the planet: legends like Arnold Palmer and Payne Stewart are permanent fixtures on menswear moodboards, and a new generation of streetwear-adjacent golf brands like Metalwood and Malbon now specialize in sharp clothes for the links. And yet, for every Marlboro-blasting, wild-pant-wearing John Daly in the field of your average PGA tournament, there are a hundred anonymous guys in frumpy polos and too-tight Lululemon pants.
Which is why Lee feels like such a breath of fresh air. He’s still extremely new to the pro circuit—he’s yet to even earn his PGA Tour card—but he’s already established himself as a singularly rad presence, rocking his signature mock necks on the fairways and a handful of galaxy-brain combinations (like a beanie over a cap with a swishy tracksuit) during warmups. At the US Open this weekend, Lee is a +10000 underdog to lift the trophy—but he’s absolutely my betting favorite to deliver the tournament’s illest vibes.