Scottie Scheffler is set to step onto the greens at the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club wearing Nike shoes that quietly tell a story with two words printed on their soles: lost and found. The shoes salute Walter Hagen and the strange saga of the Wanamaker Trophy — a tale that stretches from Olympia Fields to Baltimore Country Club and ends with a surprising rediscovery in Detroit in 1930.
Nike’s special-edition championship shoes are more than fashion; they’re a wink at golf history. For years the brand has released models tied to each major, and this week’s pair nods to one of the sport’s oddest episodes, turned into a tiny, wearable headline on the bottom of a champion’s shoe.
Hagen’s story reads like a movie beat: after winning the PGA title in the match-play era at Olympia Fields, he apparently handed the massive Wanamaker Trophy to a cab driver and told him to take it to his hotel. The trophy’s size made it impractical to carry through a night of celebration, and that practical choice set up an entire legend about a trophy that vanished.
What followed was years of not knowing. The Wanamaker Trophy did not make it back to the hotel, and for a long time the sporting world assumed it was gone. Hagen kept playing and kept winning, adding the 1926 and 1927 PGA Championships to his résumé, which let him skate past awkward questions about the missing trophy for a while.
When asked about the trophy at the 1928 PGA, Hagen famously shrugged off the question with, “I will win it anyway, so I didn’t bring it.” That line became part of the lore, but Hagen’s streak ended that year when Leo Diegel beat him in the quarterfinals at Baltimore Country Club and the truth finally had to come out.
Officials at the country club had no Wanamaker to hand over, so Diegel was presented with the Maryland Cup Trophy that was sitting in the lobby instead. It was an odd, almost farcical moment for a sport known for its tradition, the kind of thing that gets passed down in locker-room conversation and then morphs into legend about how even great champions can be humanly fallible.
The twist came two years later, in October 1930, when Hagen discovered the very trophy everyone had assumed lost. A New York Evening Journal headline captured the find in jubilant, slightly theatrical prose: “In Detroit last week. Hagen, while going through some old trunks, unearthed a bulky package. Lo, and behold! It was the P.G.A. trophy which had been lost and was found again.” That line sealed the whole episode as a genuine lost-and-found story for the record books.
Now, a century on, the design choice is simple and smart: a pair of shoes that say lost and found on their soles turns a quirky historical moment into a contemporary talking point at Aronimink. Scottie Scheffler and other Nike-backed players wearing the shoes carry a small, playful reminder that even legendary moments can have dumb, human beginnings and unexpectedly neat endings.
