Gloves are a regular piece of attire worn by most golfers, professional and amateur alike, and help players grip the club as well as prevent painful blisters and calluses.
A glove is often worn on one hand – on the left for right-handed players and vice versa – although many also wear two gloves especially in wet conditions.
Some pros have been even known to wear two gloves in rain or shine, like English golfer Aaron Rai and, most famously, former PGA Tour pro Tommy ‘Two Gloves’ Gainey.
However, wearing gloves on the course is optional, and many pros opt against wearing one at all, with several players continuing to be successful.
So which pro players are known for not wearing gloves?
Fred Couples – who had 64 professional wins in his career including the 1992 Masters – is perhaps the best known pro golfer who doesn’t wear gloves.
Couples explained that he started to play gloveless at the age of nine or 10 after ruining the gloves that his parents would buy him by playing every day.
“A golf glove cost like seven or eight bucks back then,” Couples said. “I would ruin them in the weather. I played every day, whether it was rain, sun, snow. So my parents said, ‘Listen, we can’t afford to keep buying you $8 golf gloves’. So I just stopped wearing them. That’s the story.”
Decades and many tournament wins later, and Couples still plays without a glove.
Ben Hogan and Moe Norman, both widely regarded as some of the best ball strikers in the history of the game, also didn’t wear gloves.
Meanwhile, Lucas Glover, ironically, is one of the few current tour players who choose to go gloveless.
Glover, who even managed to win the 2009 US Open at Bethpage Black during a rainy week that forced a Monday finish, said in a 2021 interview with Golf.com’s Subpar podcast that he had never used one.
“Never, ever wore one,” Glover said. “Years ago, Dick Harmon in Houston, he’d cut the fingers out for me, hitting a bunch of balls when I was a kid. He said, ‘Well you gotta try it, your hands are gonna hurt, bleed or whatever’. I said, ‘Well, I can’t really feel the club’. He goes, ‘Well, if that’s the case, let’s not do that when it matters’.
“So we kind of stayed away from it. Just never got into it. I’m a solid 10-handicap with a glove.”
Glover said his caddie wipes his grips down every tournament day to make sure he still has a good grip bare-handed.
Some players have gone as far as using sandpaper on their grips to improve traction in order to avoid wearing gloves.
Two-time US Open winner Lee Janzen would rough up his grips in his hotel room at night before tournament days, according to Golf.com.
Six-time PGA Tour winner Rocco Mediate also played glove-free and used sandpaper on his grips.
Among the other pros who play without gloves include Open Championship winners Scott Simpson and Corey Pavin, as well as former pro and TV analyst Arron Oberholser.
