At Royal Portrush, pretty much every Nike Golf staffer competing in the 2019 British Open Championship is wearing a black-and-white pattern shirt that looks kind of like a camo pattern or kind of like a Rorschach test printed on a golf polo.
There are two versions of the shirt: one with the black being the fill color and one with white being the fill color. However, it's pretty much impossible to make out what the pattern is.
The shirts have been roasted on Twitter throughout Open Week, as each staffer takes their turn wearing one of the two scripted shirts. So what's up with them?
This version of the Nike polo is actually a patterned shirt telling the story of the creation of the Giant's Causeway.
Been told those shirts some Nike guys are playing at Portrush were inspired by the legend of the Giant's Causeway. That wouldn’t have been my first guess. pic.twitter.com/8Rhasopp3h
— Rex Hoggard (@RexHoggardGC) July 19, 2019
The Giant's Causeway is a UNESCO World Heritage site that's an area of some 40,000 interlocking basalt columns, the result of an ancient volcanic fissure eruption. The geometric shapes are fascinating to look at, and they reminded locals of a brick-paved road.
As it turns out, there are similar basalt columns at a site in Scotland called Fingal's Cave on the island of Staffa. So, the name Giant's Causeway was given to the imagined road that once connected Northern Ireland to Scotland via basalt columns over the ocean. The legend goes that a giant built the columns are part of the road. Then the Irish giant Finn MacCool of Gaelic mythology was challenged to a fight by the Scottish giant Benandonner.
Finn accepted the challenge and built the road so the giants could meet and fight. There are multiple versions of the story from there. In one, Finn wins. In another, Finn realizes he's against an even bigger giant and has his wife disguise him as a baby so Benandonner is led to believe Finn's "dad" is that much bigger, so he flees back to Scotland and destroys the road behind him so Finn can't track him down.
The shirts depict some scenes from mythology, but there are also a bunch of silhouettes of golfers, too.
So it's a little bit of everything on the shirt, but the scenes are there to tell a couple of different stories.
