This Brand Doesn’t Care About Your Handicap—And That’s a Good Thing

In many ways, golf can be viewed as a game that simply exists to be beaten. We’re always trying to lower our handicap, always looking for a better way to practice, for the right club, for an extra 10 yards off the tee, for better touch around the greens—it goes on and on. This pursuit of unattainable perfection drives us to the point of obsession. Who among us hasn’t been on a conference call, doing important business, while our hands are wrapped around an imaginary golf club, focusing on the more important business of dialing in our move?

We’re all students of the game, obsessed with shaving strokes however we can. But we’re also students of life. In this way, golf mimics life—obsession only gets you so far. Life needs passion, joy, relaxation and, maybe more than anything, fun. So does golf.

The stresses of life took Students Golf founder and streetwear multi-hyphenate Michael Huynh to the brink. After years of helping artists like A$AP Rocky and Kanye West make their art a reality through his brand Publish, he found himself with a level of hypertension that no person in their mid-20s should be experiencing. Reaching what his doctors told him was a point of no return, he knew he had to make a change.

“I stepped away from the public, all my endeavors, and kind of went on this whole journey where I needed to kind of give myself a break and learn how to take care of myself again. And through that, I discovered golf.”

He was instantly hooked but, like many of us, was quite poor for those first few rounds (skill-wise and money-wise, am I right?). Remember that obsession I was talking about? Yeah, Michael found it, too. He joined country clubs and picked up weekly games. He became firmly entrenched within the SoCal golf scene. But he was still himself. He was still a fashion guy. He still loved streetwear. After leaving multiple clubs for what we’ll call a disagreement on what a golfer should wear, he decided to use his fashion chops to make a golf brand of his own. This became Students.

He launched it with a T-shirt program, using his tees as a way to tell stories and make connections between his world and the world of golf. “[You’ll] look at our T-shirt and be like, ‘What does that have to do anything with golf?’ And then you notice that it says Student Golf and you would understand the messaging behind it, right? For example, it’s this love-hate relationship we have with the game. Take a love track by Ginuwine or Mariah Carey. You know how that song talks about that loved one, right? If you remove the loved one or the significant other and put a golf ball or a driver or a putter, that’s your relationship with golf.”

For Huynh, most golfers take the game too literally. It’s about more than strokes and pars and bogeys and angles of attack—it’s a metaphor for the life we’re all living. It reflects your integrity in life, your willingness to take risks and your reaction to different emotional states. Does anxiety sharpen you or do you crumble under pressure? You can learn all of these things on a golf course. It’s a game of social studies.

Now that the brand is growing, Huynh is bringing on partners, aiming to expand its reach. It’s available in stores across the web and is constantly dropping new clothes that work on and off the course. This life is one that should intertwine with golf: it can be a lifestyle, rather than simply an obsession. Each time you wear something from Students, you remember that, in the end, golf is the best game in the world and it’s about more than just handicap improvement.

Some of our Favorite Pieces from Students Golf

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