Morehouse alums aim to make golf more accessible for everyone with their disruptive lifestyle brand Eastside Golf
Olajuwon Ajanaku and Earl Cooper are on a mission to change the face of golf by making it more accessible for everyone. The two charismatic founders of disruptive lifestyle brand Eastside Golf, who grew up playing golf on local city courses (Ajanaku in East Atlanta and Cooper in Wilmington, Delaware), met while students at Morehouse College where they played on the school’s golf team and won a national championship in 2010.
After graduating, Cooper returned to Delaware where he became a nationally ranked golf instructor, and his elite club’s first-ever African American golf pro. Ajanaku meanwhile followed his dream, playing competitive golf on the mini-tours that for a select few can lead to a career on the PGA Tour. He played well enough to win multiple tournaments, but he was unable to secure sponsorship to help defray the high costs of touring and was forced to abandon his dream after just 2 years.
Crestfallen, he moved to Detroit where he worked for a commercial finance company for 6 years, all the while hoping to one day return to professional golf. When, in 2019, he was offered a senior leadership position with a company in California that would have taken his career further away from golf, he weighed his options and decided the time had come to give the sport one more go. Understanding too well the challenges of funding a career in competitive golf, Ajanaku came up with a less-than-conventional plan: Rather than relying on the largesse of a sponsor, he would start his own brand and sponsor himself. He sketched a logo depicting a black man swinging a golf club wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt with a thick gold chain around his neck. Cooper encouraged him to put it on a T-shirt, which he did, and the first time he wore it around his neighborhood, he was stopped by literally dozens of people who wanted to know where he had gotten it and how they could get one. Recognizing that he was on to something, he passed on the California job and set up shop in his apartment. Eastside Golf, a disruptive lifestyle brand that would bring together the traditionally conservative (and predominantly White) world of golf with hip hop and street culture, was born. The company’s name is a nod to Ajanaku’s Atlanta roots.
Cooper soon left his own job to join Ajanaku in building the business, which began selling sweatshirts, hats, socks—anything they could apply the distinctive “Swingman” logo to and sell online. The company grew steadily, and in 2020, lightning struck when NBA star Chris Paul wore an Eastside Golf sweatshirt on national TV.
“That exposure just launched us into a whole different stratosphere,” says Cooper. Sales skyrocketed overnight and the brand was quickly adopted by other celebrities, including musician DJ Khaled, baseball player CC Sabathia (now an investor), and former President Barack Obama, among others.
Next, the company was discovered by Michael Jordan who proposed a Jordan x Eastside Golf collaboration. It was Jordan’s first-ever golf shoe collaboration, which proved a huge success and helped cement Eastside’s reputation as a brand to be respected. To date, they have collaborated on nine shoes and an apparel collection with Jordan Brand which are sold online and in select boutique retailers in the U.S. and Japan.
In 2022, the streaming service, Hulu, released a six-part docuseries called “Grails: When Sneakers Change the Game,” which tracks Ajanaku and Cooper’s unlikely journey. Strategic partnerships with the NBA, Apple, and Mercedes-Benz USA soon followed.
Over the next few years, Ajanaku and Cooper hope to cement their connection to Atlanta and invest in the SoFu community, expanding their reach as a brand while nurturing the next generation of golfers who might not otherwise find a path in the game.
“Our goal in creating Eastside Golf is to show people that you can be yourself and you don’t need to look a certain way to play the game,” says Cooper. “We’re changing the game forever!”
