THE SOLE OF THE GAME

This year marks the centennial of FootJoy's birth, and a century of strides for golf's most daring and dominant shoemaker

- Evan Rothman

Perley Flint. There’s a name you’d remember, right? In 1910, this young Harvard graduate joined the venerable Burt and Packard Shoe Company of Brockton, Massachusetts, the footwear production capital of the world. A passionate golfer, Flint loved to tinker with new, sport-specific designs, from shoe shapes to spike patterns to weight reduction.

By the early 1920s, the company, then Field and Flint, had a well-established reputation for innovation and quality. Marketing, not so much. Shoes and features with names like the “Anatomik,” “BurroJap,” “Burtine,” “Korrect Shape” and “Skreemer” just weren’t catching on. Go figure.

So, in 1923, a century ago—a world war, a depression, more than a dozen recessions and a global pandemic ago—the company conducted an in-house naming contest for a new feature being considered for an upcoming line of shoes. Alas, the name of the woman in the stitching room who came up with the winning moniker has been lost to history, but she took home a then-whopping $50 prize for, yes, “FootJoy.” (Actually, those being fussier times, the original spelling was “Foot-Joy.” The hyphen was dropped in 1997.)