I've owned every premium golf glove on the market. Then I noticed what the man with the most status was wearing.

I don't know why it took me twenty years to notice. Every glove I'd ever owned advertised somebody else on my hand. His didn't. His had two letters on the wrist strap — his own — pressed in a quiet gold.

I looked down at mine that afternoon. The manufacturer's mark was the first thing I saw. It occurred to me that I'd been paying to wear another company's name for as long as I'd been playing this game.

He didn't say anything about the leather. He didn't have to. It sat on his hand the way an old wallet sits in your pocket — soft, close, obvious.

I asked at the pro shop that week. Cabretta, they said, and specifically full-grain. Most gloves marketed as "premium leather" aren't. That was the first time I understood why his had felt like something and mine had felt like a glove.

The letters weren't printed. They weren't run through a machine and a color match. They were gold foil, laid in by hand and pressed by heat, one glove at a time.

I don't know why I found that reassuring. Something about knowing that the two letters on his strap had been placed there deliberately — not stamped out by the ten thousand — made the thing feel earned rather than issued.

I understood, standing next to him at the sixth tee, that his glove was not meant to be seen from a distance. It was meant to be seen at the handshake. At the scorecard. At the drink after.

That's the audience that matters, I think, at our age. Not the gallery. The four other men who were standing close enough to know the difference.

He wasn't wearing anything that asked for attention. No branding on the exterior. No color panel. Just the leather, the stitching, and — on the strap, where only he and the men close to him would ever see it — his own two letters.

I ordered one the following week. My initials, this time. Not somebody else's.