Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant Have Their Day on The Bag

MacKenzie Golf Bags is dropping one bag for each of NBA's all-time great players.

A vintage Michael Jordan jersey that was collecting creative dust led to the making of MacKenzie Golf Bags’ latest shop special that will drop on Wednesday, Feb. 16. 

One day later, Thursday, Feb. 17, the Beaverton, Ore.-based custom bag manufacturer will drop another shop special, a carry bag that pays homage to Kobe Bryant.

These bags are not limited-edition runs, but one-of-one works. First come, first serve. You snooze, you lose.

Each bag costs $2,000 and will go on sale via the company’s website at 5 p.m. PST — 8 p.m. EST — on their respective day. 

This Michael Jordan-inspired bag is the only one the company will make / MacKenzie Golf Bags

“These are the 23rd and 24th shop specials that we’ve done,” says Nic Mulflur, company owner and president, “so the idea initially came from the fact that Jordan wears 23, obviously. And 24 is Kobe. That paired with the fact that we've had a vintage Jordan jersey collecting dust on our ‘idea shelf’ for a few months made for a pretty logical direction to take this project."

Once the shop specials are sold, the company claims the design will “never be repeated again.”

Interestingly, the company's lineage traces back to St. Andrews Old Course caddie Rick MacKenzie and not the acclaimed course architect Alister MacKenzie. In 1985, MacKenzie was assigned to carry the bags for Peter Jacobsen, of PGA Tour fame, and his brother David. MacKenzie sized up their tour bags and decided to make life easier for himself. He removed the essential contents from their bags and put them into his simplistic pencil bag. 

The Jacobsens were so enamored with the caddie's bag that upon returning home to Oregon, they hired a local leatherworker to recreate its design in what became known as the MacKenzie Walker. A company was also born. 

Through the years, the bag's craftsmanship and functionality have been refined as each bag is handcrafted to a customer's specifications. MacKenzie offers ready-to-ship bags, along with other accessories such as pouches, headcovers and trestle sticks to prop up the bag. 

Every now and then, though, Mulflur says his team's creative juices take over.

"The shop specials are sort of an outlet for us to scratch our own creative itch," he  says. "Where most of our bags require accommodating the ideas and requests of our customers, which is awesome, with these projects we get to have a blank canvas to create whatever we want. We enjoy that."

For example, the seventh shop special (007) was a tribute to James Bond. Bag 022 tips its cap to Gordon Bombay and the Mighty Ducks.

"We will definitely do some more shop specials, we’re always thinking about new ideas and fun ways to create unique golf bags," Mulflur says.