A plain polo is just a polo, but put a club crest on the chest and a tournament name on the sleeve and it becomes a small piece of someone's golf history. Learning to read those logos tells you where a shirt has been, roughly when it was made and why it might be worth wearing today.
Where to look
The main logo almost always sits on the left chest, which is where a club puts its crest and a tournament puts its name. The sleeve is worth checking too, because that is where a second logo tends to end up, whether it belongs to the maker, a sponsor or the event itself. Some shirts also carry a small embroidered mark or a year at the back of the neck, just below the collar.
Then turn the shirt inside out. Next to the brand and care labels there is sometimes a second label from the pro shop that sold it, and that label can tell you more about where a shirt comes from than anything on the outside.
Embroidered or printed
Most club and tournament logos on older shirts are embroidered, and the back of the embroidery shows how well it has held up: if the stiff backing on the inside is still intact, so is the logo. Printed logos are more common on newer shirts and promotional pieces. They crack and fade a little with every wash, which can look good, but we still count it as wear.
What a logo can tell you
A club crest ties a shirt to one course, and since many clubs only sell their shirts in their own pro shop, those pieces are hard to find anywhere else. A tournament name, often with a year, places a shirt in time, even if it rarely tells you whether it was sold to spectators, handed to volunteers or made for players and staff. The style of the embroidery, the colours and the brand on the label usually point to one decade, and when we aren't sure we write "around" and give the decade rather than a year.
What a logo can't tell you
It can't tell you who wore it. Unless a shirt comes with paperwork or a provenance we can check, we never claim that a player wore it, because a shirt from a tournament is a shirt from a tournament and not from the leaderboard.
Why we like them
Club and tournament shirts are golf culture you can actually wear. They carry the name of a place someone travelled to, a week someone remembers or a course someone played once and never forgot, and that is exactly the kind of thing we go looking for.