A king tried to ban it
Golf as we know it grew up in Scotland in the fifteenth century, and it was so popular that in 1457 King James the Second banned it, along with football, because men were playing instead of practising archery for war. The ban was repeated several times and ignored. Later Scottish kings took up the game themselves. Golf returned to the Olympic Games in 2016, 112 years after it was last played there.
The Old COURSE at St Andrews, on the east coast of Scotland, is often called the home of golf. Its holes were once 22, until in 1764 some of the short ones were combined, leaving 18. Other courses copied St Andrews, and that is why a round of golf has eighteen holes.
Why golf balls have dimples
Early golf balls were smooth: first leather pouches stuffed with boiled feathers, then balls of a hard tree sap called gutta-percha. Players noticed that old, battered balls flew further than new smooth ones, and makers began hammering patterns into the surface on purpose. Modern balls have around three hundred to four hundred small dimples.
The dimples stir up a thin layer of turbulent air around the ball, which lets the air flow cling to the ball for longer and leaves a smaller wake behind it. That cuts the drag, and a dimpled ball flies roughly twice as far as a smooth one hit the same way.
Birds, a bogey and a round on the Moon
A score of one under PAR on a HOLE is a BIRDIE, from American slang of the late nineteenth century when bird meant something excellent. Two under is an EAGLE, a bigger bird, and three under is an ALBATROSS, an even bigger and much rarer one. One over par is a BOGEY, named after a popular song about a bogey man who is always just out of reach.
In 1971 the astronaut Alan Shepard hit two golf balls on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 14 mission, using the head of a club he had smuggled aboard fixed to a tool handle. In the low gravity and with no air to slow them, he joked that the second one went for miles and miles. Our space race page covers the missions that got him there.
Clubs, hazards and the rest of the grid
A golfer carries a set of clubs: a DRIVER for long shots from the TEE, an IRON for approach shots, a WEDGE for short, high shots, and a PUTTER for rolling the ball into the hole on the GREEN. The CADDIE carries them and often advises on which club to use.
Between tee and green lies the FAIRWAY, and around it the hazards: a BUNKER or SAND TRAP. A SLICE curves the ball away to one side and a HOOK curves it the other way. A good SWING and a gentle PUTT make up most of the game, and a HANDICAP lets players of different abilities compete fairly. The odds of an ordinary club golfer hitting a hole in one — sending the ball from the tee straight into the hole with a single stroke — are often put at around twelve thousand to one.