Mr Stephen Malbon is living the dream. It’s a clear, early autumnal afternoon on California’s stunning Monterey Peninsula and the self-confessed golf addict – and founder of Malbon Golf, the Los Angeles-based lifestyle brand that’s injecting some much-needed swagger into the game – is watching his two young sons play The Hay, the new par-three course at Pebble Beach designed by none other than Mr Tiger Woods.

“There’s a little Mexican restaurant with good tequila and an outdoor patio with a fire pit,” Malbon explains of the course, which opened in April. “It’s kid-friendly. Kids get to play free year-round. It’s super, super cool.”

Cool is a word that hasn’t often appeared in the same sentence as golf. This is a truth that’s reflected in Malbon’s own golfing story and the ethos of his brand, which sprang from his experiences, including repeatedly succumbing to golf addiction. “If you have an addictive personality, when you fall, you fall, right?” he laughs. “Each time I fell, I fell hard… When you’re addicted to golf and then you leave it alone for a few years, you come back, and your addiction is definitely higher than it was. You go even harder the next time because you missed years of doing what you were doing.”

Malbon first got the bug as a 12-year-old playing at Hell’s Point, a municipal golf course in Virginia Beach, but then gave the game up in his mid-teens. “All of my friends were doing other stuff,” he explains. “Girls weren’t dating golfers. My wife didn’t want to date a golfer. That’s not the American Dream. Nobody wants to date the star of the college golf team, so I left it alone and started partying and doing things around the beach – skateboarding, surfing, girls, beach volleyball and all the fun things that were way more appealing at the time than standing on the range for eight hours a day hitting balls with everyone thinking you’re the nerd because you’re a golfer.”

He fell back into the game while at art college in Atlanta, which was where, in the pre-internet era, he started Frank151, a quarterly, handmade book curated by rappers, skaters, artists and other members of his extensive creative circle. Mr Lenny Kravitz, A$AP Rocky, RZA, De La Soul and Futura 2000 are just a few of the names who have gone on to partner with Frank151 to produce its “distinctive mix of exclusive and unvarnished content”.

When he launched Frank, Malbon was caddying to make ends meet. “I was making $350 a day, five days a week,” he recalls. “I got obsessed again. Soon, I was gambling with all of the other caddies on Mondays and sneaking off to the driving range three days a week to hit hundreds of balls.”

The third and most recent time Malbon’s golf habit returned was in 2015, by which time he had moved to Los Angeles. He started to play again and then began posting golf pictures on his Instagram but found that his regular followers “were very turned off by it”. He responded by starting a separate Instagram account that developed into what he calls “a golf mood board.” Two years and many thousands of followers later, Erica, his wife and business partner, convinced him that it was time to launch Malbon Golf.

“We had a creative studio where I was doing all types of stuff for Toyota, Nike Golf and others,” the 45-year-old five-handicapper explains. “We needed to change offices and I decided I wanted to put a golf simulator in a pro shop right in the middle of Fairfax.”

Opening a golf store in the epicentre of LA’s hippest streetwear district might sound risky, but Malbon pulled on his multifaceted experience in “marketing, advertising, storytelling, graphic design, art direction, producing and directing”, as well as his instincts, which were fortified by the knowledge that only a block away, Supreme had built a skate park inside its retail store. His hunch was correct and now Messrs Steph Curry, Justin Bieber and Travis Scott are among the brand’s high-profile fans.

Malbon Golf is an expertly curated blend of the old and the new, golfing gear that gets the technical details right while offering a fresh, contemporary perspective. Malbon describes the golf clothes he makes as “young and very light” – an antidote to the “heaviness” that persists in golf.

“It’s a fine line of introducing new people to [golf],” he says, “and letting them know that this is the greatest game on Earth, and at the same time, you know, educating them about the old-guard traditions. Share this awesomeness with more people. It’s your duty.”

As he meanders around the course after his sons, Malbon talks about how golf is now experiencing a similar transformation that snow sports went through. “Skiers were really turned off by snowboarding at first,” he says. “They were like, ‘You guys are listening to punk rock and wearing baggy pants and you dress like skateboarders with flannels and beanies and chain wallets.’ Skiing was very expensive, very French and very sophisticated, and then the urban or inner-city youth [came in]. The industry changes. People were very scared and very resistant for a long time and then eventually, snowboarding became bigger than skiing. There’s resistance until there’s acceptance, you know?”

These changes are evident in the make-up of the Malbon Golf Club, a social off-shoot of the brand that began with its founder’s core group of LA golf buddies, a collective that just happens to include the likes of pro skater Mr Eric Koston, rapper ScHoolboy Q and the comedian Mr George Lopez. “We’d have 12 people play on Friday,” he says. “Those same 12 still play, but there’s now another 130 that join us.”

“You have to be a kind of sicko [to play golf],” he remarks. “It’s similar to skateboarding or being a musician or a graffiti artist; you’re fighting pretty tough odds to try to do something that’s very, very, very difficult. And no matter how much you practice and do it, it’s not going to ever get easier.”

One of Malbon’s favourite slogans, “invest in golf”, appears regularly on his Instagram feed. The phrase was lifted from an old ticket to the Masters Tournament and now encapsulates his approach to the game.

“There’s a saying, if you want to know how someone does business or you truly want to get to know them, play a round of golf with them,” he says. “Are they hotheads? Are they lazy? Are they poised? Do they have ice in their veins? You can find all of that out golfing. Normally, you’d have to work a year to figure all that out. If you go golfing with a stranger, at the end of the day, you’re not strangers anymore; you’re like brothers because golf is such a hard task. Playing golf pays dividends, not only for you, but for your entire family, your acquaintanceships, networking and health.”

This belief in the positive power of golf explains why Malbon Golf’s mission is to get younger people to participate. “It could be via video games,” he says, “or it could be by wearing a fashion brand like Malbon that has golf artwork on it, but also looks cool. All of a sudden, people are like, ‘Hey, I like your shirt,’ even the guy that doesn’t even play golf. As all of that stuff is happening, the old guard is saying, ‘What’s our other option? Keep yelling at people about hoodies and wearing their hats backwards?’ The culture of the sport is lame, not the game. The game is as fun as fuck.”

And with that, Stephen Malbon is off to have some fun, which on this sun-kissed afternoon involves soaking in the awesomeness of being with his boys in one of the greatest golf playgrounds on Earth.