There is a shoe on the market right now that knows exactly what it is, and that confidence alone is half the argument. The Eastside Golf x Nike "Take Flight" collection, two shoes, one story, zero apologies . It arrives as the brand's second footwear collaboration with Nike, and it carries the particular weight of a sequel that has something to prove and the receipts to prove it.
Featuring the Nike Air Max Plus G and the Nike Victory Tour 4, the collection marks the second release between the two brands.
But to treat "Take Flight" as simply a product drop is to miss the point almost entirely. This is a collection built on a thesis: that golf belongs to everyone who has ever loved it, including the people the sport spent decades pretending weren't there.
Olajuwon Ajanaku and Earl Cooper grew up playing golf on local city courses. Ajanaku in East Atlanta, Cooper in Wilmington, Delaware. They met as students at Morehouse College, where they played on the school's golf team and won a national championship in 2010.
The brand they eventually built together didn't emerge from a marketing brief.
Ajanaku, unable to secure sponsorship from existing brands while pursuing a professional playing career, launched his own after Cooper suggested he put the logo on a T-shirt. That logo, named "Swingman," features a Black man wearing blue jeans, white sneakers, a baseball cap and a gold Cuban link chain necklace while swinging a golf club. It became one of the most quietly radical images in American sportswear. It didn't demand entry into golf's establishment. It assumed belonging.
"Take Flight" extends that assumption into footwear with two silhouettes that speak to different registers of the same cultural frequency.
The Air Max Plus G reimagines the iconic Nike Air Max Plus as a performance golf shoe in a sky-blue colorway, featuring spikeless integrated traction that performs just as well on the course as it does in the city.
For anyone who came of age watching Air Max culture define sneaker identity in the late nineties, seeing the silhouette translated to fairway use is something close to disorienting in the best possible sense; a reminder that design objects carry memory, and that memory can be repurposed rather than erased.
Hidden design elements include the shoe's iconic cage graphic that spells out "Eastside" and "Golf," a detail that rewards close looking, the kind of easter egg that separates a garment from a commodity.
The Victory Tour 4, meanwhile, plays the long game.
Designed for the course and inspired by the sky, the shoe's premium fabric finish offers a subtle sky glare effect, while blue chrome accents on the Swoosh logos and sole reflect the stratosphere. The spiked sole, with its carbon plate, is engineered for optimal green-grass performance.
It is, in other words, a serious golf shoe that happens to look like a painting of weather.
The finish shimmers like sunlight breaking through clouds, while the chrome accents catch light with every step, built on Nike's carbon plate tech, the spiked sole offers stability and performance without sacrificing style.
The sky motif is not arbitrary.
"Take Flight" symbolizes golf and community rising higher together, breaking new boundaries and setting new standards for what the sport can be, drawing inspiration from the sky, it drives its wearers to reach new heights and soar beyond their limits in golf and in life.
That kind of language can read as corporate boilerplate from any other brand. From Eastside Golf, it lands differently, because the founders have actually been doing the work.
Of the roughly 28,000 PGA members nationwide, only about 300 are African American, less than half of one percent, The barriers have never been purely about talent. They have been about access, representation, and the quiet but powerful feeling that a place was, or wasn't, built with you in mind.
Eastside Golf has spent its existence challenging that last part.
The brand isn't trying to dismantle golf's traditions. It is expanding who gets to participate in them, rejecting the idea that loving the game requires adopting someone else's uniform.
That's what makes "Take Flight" work.
The Air Max Plus G brings decades of sneaker culture onto the course without apology. The Victory Tour 4 takes the traditional performance golf shoe and pushes it somewhere more expressive. One moves culture toward golf; the other moves golf toward culture.
They meet exactly where Eastside Golf has always existed.
And unlike so many attempts to make golf younger, cooler or more inclusive, none of it feels like a costume. Ajanaku and Cooper didn't discover golf because it became fashionable. They were already there.
"Take Flight" is simply another reminder that they belonged there all along.
And now they're making damn sure the next generation knows it, too.
https://eastsidegolf.com/