By Brian Sommer
There is a small dishonesty endemic to the modern golf-equipment review, and because it is small, cheerful and commercially useful, it is generally permitted to flourish. The reviewer receives the product. The reviewer photographs the product. The reviewer expresses astonishment at the product. And, with a consistency unknown to nature but quite familiar to marketing, the product turns out to be excellent.
Every driver is longer. Every iron is purer. Every ball has somehow reconciled the ancient quarrel between distance, feel and spin. Training aids unlock things. Putters inspire confidence. Shoes provide stability. Rangefinders offer clarity. And now, having apparently exhausted the revolutionary possibilities of the golf club itself, we arrive at the glove.
One begins to wonder what became of merely making something well. Which brings us to Bruce Bolt. I have been wearing the company’s golf gloves for some time now, including through the heat and humidity of South Florida, an environment rather less forgiving of leather than the air-conditioned studio in which much golf equipment is removed reverently from its packaging.
And the first thing to say is the most important. They are very good. The leather is exceptionally soft. The fit is excellent. They grip the club well. They have remained supple. Mine have held up nicely in conditions that can reduce an ordinary golf glove to something resembling damp stationery. In fact, the first time I put one on, I was reminded not so much of another golf glove as of the better batting gloves I wore during my baseball-playing years. There was something familiar about the close fit, the softness and the slightly more substantial construction.
This turns out not to be accidental.
The Boy, the Glove and the Land Cruiser
The Bruce Bolt brand began in Austin, Texas, in 2017 with Bear Mayer, then 16 syears old baseball player. Mayer disliked the batting gloves available to him and decided he could make something better. There was also, according to company lore, the small matter of a 1993 Toyota Land Cruiser named Jennifer for which he wished to raise money. This is almost too perfectly American to improve upon. A teenage baseball player wants a better glove and an old Toyota, starts a company and, within a decade, has professional athletes wearing his products.
If Norman Rockwell had lived long enough to paint direct-to-consumer entrepreneurship, he might have found the composition irresistible. The “Bruce” in Bruce Bolt is Mayer’s grandfather, himself a competitive baseball player whose stories helped inspire the brand. What began with batting gloves developed into a family business and eventually migrated into golf.
And golf, it must be said, is fertile territory for precisely this sort of company. The game has no shortage of enormous corporations producing excellent but increasingly similar equipment. There is room for a smaller company with a recognizable identity, a good story and enough confidence to make something slightly different.
Bruce Bolt does.
The golf gloves retain much of the company’s baseball inheritance: thickly luxurious Cabretta leather, conspicuous styling, a snugger construction and considerably more personality than the standard white glove that has populated golf shops for generations.
The Original Series is generally sold as a two-glove package for around $60, while signature and specialty models cost somewhat more. So, although Bruce Bolt undoubtedly occupies premium territory, the economics are not quite as extravagant as they first appear. At roughly $30 per glove, it is expensive without being absurd, particularly in a market where premium gloves from established companies can reach $40 each.
Nobody is being asked to mortgage the house. Though golf being golf, I am sure someone could find a way.
On the Hand
The company says its golf gloves use very thin AAA Cabretta leather, about 0.45 millimeters, along with conical fingertips, articulated wrist construction, inverse stitching and treatments intended to help the leather remain soft. Some of this is marketing vocabulary, as one would expect. Some of it you can actually feel. The leather is the obvious starting point. It is genuinely soft noticeably so and has that almost slightly tacky quality of very fine leather when new. Yet the glove does not feel delicate in the way some ultra-thin tour gloves do, where one fears that an enthusiastic Velcro removal might constitute a warranty event.
The Bruce Bolt feels more substantial. That may be the baseball DNA again. The fingers fit closely without excessive material collecting at their ends, and the conical construction seems particularly effective here. Anyone who has spent eighteen holes periodically pinching loose leather away from a fingertip will appreciate the difference.
The inverse stitching is also more than decorative jargon. With the seams moved outward, the interior is unusually clean. You do not think about the stitching while wearing the glove, which may be the highest compliment stitching can receive. The wrist is similarly well judged. Secure without being constricting, substantial without feeling orthopedic. Put together, the glove feels expensive. That sentence may be more useful than several hundred words about proprietary construction. You put it on and understand where some of the money went.
The South Florida Test
Then there is weather. South Florida is an excellent place to discover which claims about golf equipment survive contact with reality. Heat, sweat, humidity, sudden rain and the general sensation of attempting recreational athletics inside a Turkish bath are not especially kind to leather. A glove that feels exquisite for six swings on a launch monitor may possess rather less charm on the fifteenth tee in August. The Bruce Bolts have done remarkably well.
Mine have remained soft and have retained their shape. They have not developed the stiff, cardboard-like character that eventually condemns many gloves to the bottom of the bag. Grip has remained excellent, and the leather has proved more durable than I expected given how soft it feels.
That does not mean they are immortal. They are golf gloves. Golf gloves wear out. This apparently needs saying in an industry where ordinary deterioration is sometimes treated as a design failure and ordinary durability as a technological triumph. A golfer with a death grip may destroy one considerably faster than another golfer. Someone playing three times a week in Florida presents a rather different challenge to leather than someone playing twice a month in Connecticut. Storage matters. Moisture matters. How often the glove is removed matters.
Mine have held up very well. That is enough for me.
Two Gloves and a Very Good Idea That Was Not Newly Discovered
Bruce Bolt generally sells its golf gloves in pairs and encourages golfers to rotate them, sometimes described rather charmingly as a Front 9 and Back 9 arrangement. The reasoning is perfectly sound. Sweat saturates leather. Wet leather stretches. Rotating gloves gives one an opportunity to dry while the other is in use.
This is sensible. It is not, however, the discovery of penicillin. Golfers in hot climates have been carrying multiple gloves for decades. Tour players routinely rotate them. Anyone who has played summertime golf in Florida knows the special misery of inserting one’s hand into a glove that has acquired the temperature and consistency of a restaurant hand towel.
Bruce Bolt has taken this perfectly sensible practice and built it into the way the product is sold. Good for them. Indeed, the pair may actually be the more important part of the value proposition. Rather than buying one expensive glove and torturing it through eighteen holes, you have two very good ones and a built-in reason to alternate them. Sometimes good product design consists not of inventing a new human behavior but of noticing one that already makes sense.
And Then There Is the Matter of Taste
I chose burnt orange and white. Not because I have developed some secret allegiance to the University of Texas, but because the combination appealed to me and several of the alternatives did not. This is another thing golf reviewers seem strangely reluctant to admit. Sometimes we buy things because we like the way they look. There. I have said it. Nobody needs to summon biomechanics.
Bruce Bolt certainly understands this better than most glove companies. Its gloves come in an almost indecent number of colors and collaborations. Some are restrained. Some are not. There are gloves for golfers who regard white Cabretta leather as part of the constitutional settlement of the game and others for players who appear to have dressed following an electrical accident.
I rather like this. Golf has spent enough time confusing seriousness with drabness. The glove is one of the few pieces of equipment a golfer actually wears while making the swing, and Bruce Bolt has recognized that it can be treated as an accessory rather than a consumable medical appliance.
Sergio García has his signature versions. Other athletes and creators have theirs. The lightning-bolt logo is recognizable from some distance, which is presumably rather the point. Does any of this make the glove perform better? Who cares? It looks good. Must everything pleasurable in golf submit a performance résumé before being permitted onto the course?
What Bruce Bolt Gets Right
What I like most about the Bruce Bolt glove is not that it reinvents anything. It doesn’t. It takes an extremely mature product category and pays unusual attention to it. That is rather more difficult than it sounds. There are only so many things one can do with a golf glove. It must fit closely. It must provide grip. It must remain comfortable. It ought to survive a reasonable amount of use. Ideally, it should not resemble a discarded tissue after three rounds. Beyond that, the room for revolution becomes rather narrow. Bruce Bolt works inside those limits exceptionally well.
The leather is better than most. The fit is better than most. The construction feels considered. The presentation is distinctive. The glove remains comfortable over a full round. And mine, importantly, have survived South Florida without surrendering their dignity. That is quite a lot. Yet golf has developed such an addiction to superlatives that this almost sounds insufficient.
We want the thing to be revolutionary. We want technology. We want transformation. We want some suggestion that the item in our shopping cart may contain a small piece of the golf game we have been unable to locate ourselves. Sometimes a glove is simply a very fine glove. And there is something refreshing about that.
The Luxury of Niceness
Golfers are sometimes strangely apologetic about liking nice equipment. They shouldn’t be. I prefer traditional blade putters. Someone else prefers a mallet the size of a sandwich. I may like the shape of one iron at address more than another even if a launch monitor insists that the numbers are nearly identical. One golfer prefers a lightweight nylon carry bag; another enjoys the slightly unreasonable pleasure of beautifully made leather.
None of this requires justification. Golf is a recreational pursuit for almost everyone playing it. Pleasure is therefore not some embarrassing side effect. It is rather close to the point. And using an object that feels beautifully made can add something to the experience.
Bruce Bolt does that.
The glove feels luxurious without becoming precious. It is unusual enough to be interesting but not so eccentric that one feels obliged to explain it on every tee. And while the branding is hardly shy, the underlying product is good enough that the branding does not have to perform all the work. That distinction matters. There are products whose entire personality disappears the moment the advertising is removed. This is not one of them. Strip away Bear Mayer’s story, Sergio García, the collaborations, the colors, the lightning bolt and the Land Cruiser named Jennifer, and you are still left with an unusually good piece of Cabretta leather.
Which is exactly as it should be.
Photo Courtesy of Bruce Bolt Golf