Golf

Introduction

• Tiger Woods teeing off during the final round of the 2005 British Open.

a cross-country game in which a player strikes a small ball with various clubs from a series of starting points (teeing grounds) into a series of holes on a course. The player who holes his ball in the fewest strokes wins. The origins of the game are difficult to ascertain, although evidence now suggests that early forms of golf were played in the Netherlands first and then in Scotland.

From a somewhat obscure antiquity, the game attained worldwide popularity, especially in the 20th century. Nothing is known about the early game's favourite venues on the European continent, but in Scotland golf was first played on seaside links with their crisp turf and natural hazards. Only later in the game's evolution did play on downs, moorland, and parkland courses begin. Golfers participate at every level, from a recreational game to popular televised professional tournaments. Despite its attractions, golf is not a game for everyone; it requires a high degree of skill that is honed only with great patience and dedication.

History

Origins

The origin of golf has long been debated. Some historians trace the sport back to the Roman game of paganica, which involved using a bent stick to hit a wool- or feather-stuffed leather ball. According to one view, paganica spread throughout several countries as the Romans conquered much of Europe during the 1st century BC and eventually evolved into the modern game. Others cite chuiwan (ch'ui-wan) as the progenitor, a game played in China during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and earlier and described as “a game in which you hit a ball with a stick while walking.” Chuiwan is thought to have been introduced into Europe by traders during the Middle Ages. However, upon close examination, neither theory is convincing.
Other early stick-and-ball games included the English game of cambuca (a term of Celtic origin). In France the game was known as chambot and may have been related to Irish hurling and Scottish shinty, or camanachd, as well as to the French pastime (derived from an Italian game) of jeu de mail. This game was in turn exported to the Low Countries, Germany, and England (where it was called pall-mall, pronounced “pell mell”).
As early as 1819 the English traveler William Ousely claimed that golf descended from the Persian national game of chaugán, the ancestor of modern polo. Later, historians, not least because of the resemblance of names, considered the French cross-country game of chicane to be a descendant of chaugán. In chicane a ball had to be driven with the fewest possible strokes to a church or garden door. This game was described in the novels of Émile Zola and Charles Deulin, where it went by the name of chole.
Chicane closely resembled the game of kolf, which the Dutch golf historian J.H. van Hengel believed to be the earliest form of golf. Many traditions surround the game of kolf. One relates that it was played annually in the village of Loenen, Netherlands, beginning in 1297, to commemorate the capture of the killer of Floris V, count of Holland and Zeeland, a year earlier. No evidence supports this early date, however, and it would seem to be a clear anachronism.
Based on the evidence, it may well be that golf came into being only a little before the 15th century. It may be conceived as a domesticated form of such medieval games as football, in which the size of the goals and the ball was radically reduced and in which, as a consequence, the element of violence had to give way to the element of skill. Seen from this perspective, golf would be the result of the process of civilization as described in the work of German-born sociologist Norbert Elias.

Scots as inventors: a popular fallacy

For many years it was believed that golf originated in Scotland. This belief rested on three references in Scottish acts of Parliament from the second half of the 15th century. In a resolution of the 14th Parliament, convened in Edinburgh on March 6, 1457, the games of football and golf (“futbawe and ye golf”) were banned with a vengeance (“utterly cryt done”). This ban was repeated in 1471 when Parliament thought it “expedient [th]at…ye futbal and golf be abusit.” In a resolution passed in 1491, football, golf, and other useless games were outlawed altogether (“fut bawis gouff or uthir sic unproffitable sports”). In addition, these texts enjoined the Scottish people to practice archery, a sport which might be put to good use in defending the country.

• Four men playing golf, illustration from a book of hours by Simon Bening, c. 1520; in the …

In more recent times the validity of these sources has been called into question on two grounds. First, pictorial evidence now seems to point to a continental European origin of golf. The earliest golfing picture is a miniature in a book of hours formerly owned by Adelaïde of Savoy, the duchess of Burgundy. Executed about the middle of the 15th century (Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 76), it predates the earliest of the Scottish sources quoted above. The miniature from Adelaïde's book is, in turn, the forerunner of the well-known example from a book of hours in the British Library that is ascribed variously to the workshops of two Flemish artists, Simon Bening (c. 1483–1561) and Gerard Horenbout (c. 1465–1541), both of whom were active in the Ghent-Bruges school in the first half of the 16th century. There is yet another miniature, from the book of hours of Philip I (the Handsome), the son of Emperor Maximilian I (Colegio Real de Corpus Christi, Valencia). Created in 1505, one year before Philip's death, it shows golfers in the process of swinging and putting.In addition to the books of hours, there are engravings that highlight golf. Playing Monkeys, by Pieter van der Borcht (1545–1608), features a monkey taking a swing at a teed ball, and Venus, Protectress of Lovers, by Pieter Janszoon Saenredam (1597–1665), shows, in the margins of a picture of an embracing couple with Venus and Cupid, some people playing games such as football and golf. The latter work is a copy of an earlier work by engraver Hendrik Goltzius (1558–1617).
The earliest known scenes depicting golf in Scotland are found in two paintings dated 1680 (or 1720) and 1746–47. The earlier work is an oil painting by an unknown artist who depicted a gentlemen foursome and two caddies against the backdrop of the town of St. Andrews. The second, a watercolour by the Englishman Paul Sandby (1725–1809), shows a squad of soldiers fighting over a golf ball in the shrubbery at the foot of Edinburgh Castle.
As to the Scottish acts of Parliament, the difficulty there lies in the uncertainty concerning the meaning of the term golf in 15th-century Scotland. In the equally controversial debate about the origins of cricket, British historian Eric Midwinter pointed out that a sport's provenance cannot be proved by a mere textual reference to a game unless the context and the meaning of the reference are exactly known:

Thus, by the strictest definition of historical evidence, we require both the name, and its [being attached] to some description which is recognizable cricket, before it is safe to talk about the origin of the game.

The Scottish sources fail to meet this standard for the origins of golf.
As early as 1360 the magistrate of Brussels issued an ordinance according to which anyone caught playing a similar club-and-ball game was threatened with a fine of 20 shillings or confiscation of his upper garment (“Item. wie met coluen tsolt es om twintich scell' oft op hare ouerste cleet.”). While it seems plausible that met coluen (which is the dative plural of colve, of which kolf, meaning “with clubs,” is a variant) yielded the Scots loanword golf, it is clear from the verb tsollen (from the French souler, “to play football”) that the text envisaged the rough competitive team game of soule played with a curved stick.
That on the Continent kolve primarily denoted a hockey stick becomes evident from the Boek van Merline (1261), poet Jacob van Maerlant's translation of Robert de Boron's Livre de Merlin, in which young Merlin is engaged in a game of soule à la crosse (hockey). Where in the French source Merlin viciously hits one of his playmates with a crosse (a hockey stick), in Maerlant's Flemish version the word used is kolve. Proof that golf in Scotland had exactly the same meaning as its Flemish counterpart kolve comes in The Buik of Alexander the Conqueror, a translation, by Sir Gilbert Hay (c. 1460), of the medieval Roman d'Alexandre. In Hay's French source, Alexander the Great had received a ball (estuef) and a hockey stick (crosse) from the king of Persia. In his Scots version, Hay rendered crosse into golf-staff and further alludes to the stick as a means with which to chase the Persian emperor and his lords to and fro like a ball in a hockey match. Such a description leaves hardly any doubt that in 15th-century Scotland the term golf primarily referred to a fiercely contended team game, and this accounts for its being banned in the acts of Parliament quoted above.
A continental origin of golf is also suggested by a linguistic analysis of golfing terms and a recently discovered Dutch description of golf from the first half of the 16th century. Golf historians have long surmised that the terms tee and stymie are based on the Dutch word tuitje (a diminutive of tuit, meaning “snout”) and the phrase stuit me (meaning “hinders me”), but these derivations have been questioned on phonological grounds and therefore have never been accepted by historical dictionaries. However, a Dutch origin of tee is still plausible, as a variation of the Flemish tese, meaning “target” (as in curling); the word originally referred to the hole but eventually came to mean a “pile of sand taken from the hole.” There are also good reasons to posit a Dutch origin for the words putt (from putten, “put into a hole”) and bunker (a possible back-formation of bancaert kolve).
However, the source most likely to tip the scales in favour of a Dutch origin is a phrase booklet written by a Dutch schoolmaster, Pieter van Afferden, or Petrus Apherdianus (1510–80). The book, Tyrocinium latinae linguae (Recruits' Drill in the Latin Language; 1545), was intended to impart a knowledge of Latin in everyday situations by matching Latin phrases with Dutch ones. This source predates the earliest Scottish description of golf—the 1636 Vocabula by Scotsman David Wedderburn—by almost a century. Its remarkable feature, however, is that in a chapter titled “De Clauis Plumbatis” (“On the [Game with the] Leaded Clubs”) it is much more explicit than other early sources. In the Tyrocinium the club is indeed called a kolve, and the game as such is referred to as kolven (the infinitive of a verb used as a noun). This confirms that the Scots word golf is indeed based on kolve or kolf. In the course of a dialogue in this text, the fictitious players also give the first indication of the existence of rules. For instance, a golfer who misses the ball is said to lose the right to strike (wastes a stroke); to step onto the teeing ground before it is one's turn is against the rules because a certain order of play has to be adhered to; a player must be allowed to swing freely, necessitating that other players step back; a golfer is not allowed to stand in the light of his partner; and, lastly, in order to putt, the ball has to be struck—merely pushing it is forbidden and is called a knavish trick. The hole, however, is called not a put but a cuyl. Generally speaking, then, the Tyrocinium proves that, by the middle of the 16th century, golf in the Netherlands was a firmly established and rather sophisticated game.

Golf in Scotland

Despite the likelihood of a continental origin of golf, King James IV, who had prohibited the hockeylike game of golf earlier (in 1491), nevertheless became the first authenticated player of “real” golf. That royalty were the leaders of this new sporting fashion is to be expected. The route of transmission to Scotland was likely to have been Flemish traders and craftsmen who had found employment at the Scottish court.
The lord high treasurer's accounts for the years 1502, 1503, and 1506 include payments for the king's “golf clubbis and ballis” and other equipment during stays at Perth, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews. In addition, the entry for the year 1506 specifies the amount of three French crowns lost by the king in a golfing bet (betting on the outcome of games was widespread in the Middle Ages).
The Stuarts also gave the game its first woman golfer—Mary, Queen of Scots, who was charged with playing in the fields beside Seton only a few days after the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. The contemporary account of the queen's misconduct also makes it clear that at the time a golf club was still called a golf in Scotland. The fact that in Scotland golf counted royalty among its followers and the fact that the first pictorial representations of the game are to be found in books of hours owned by members of the continental high aristocracy suggest that from the middle of the 15th century there are two games to distinguish: one was kolve/kolf, a variety of hockey that was popular with townspeople and the peasantry, and the other was golf, the preserve of the upper crust of society. However, there is no evidence of the existence of the latter in Scotland much before the 16th century.

Development of golfers' associations

Early British societies

There is another provenance story that says James I introduced golf to Blackheath in 1608, long thought to be the year the historic royal Blackheath Golf Club was founded. Although King James and his courtiers played golf somewhere in the vicinity, it is doubtful whether any organized society then existed, and research has set the earliest date of such a society nearly two centuries later. W.E. Hughes, editor of the Chronicles of Blackheath Golfers, ascribes the club's foundation to 1787.
The oldest club with documentary proof of its origin is the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith, now the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, whose modern home is at Muirfield in East Lothian. Its genesis was a move by a group of players to hold a competition or tournament. In 1744 “several Gentlemen of Honour skillful in the ancient and healthfull exercise of Golf” petitioned the Edinburgh city council to provide a silver club for annual competition on the links of Leith. The Society of St. Andrews Golfers, now the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews (R&A), Scotland, was formed in 1754 by a group of 22 golfers who played there. The rules that the society adopted were almost identical to the Edinburgh Gentlemen Golfers' rules. These two clubs played major roles in the development of the game in Scotland. Eventually the R&A became, by common consent, the oracle on rules. In 1919 it accepted the management of the British Open and Amateur championships. The R&A thus became the governing body for golf in the British Isles and throughout most of the Commonwealth.
With the birth of the Royal North Devon Golf Club in 1864, golf took a firm foothold in England. The Devon club was the first course on seaside links outside Scotland. The Royal Liverpool Golf Club was established in 1869 on a rabbit warren at Hoylake. In its infancy players simply cut holes with their penknives and stuck feathers in them for the guidance of those who were coming behind. The rabbits were the greenskeepers. By 1870 the club was fairly established, and members played matches against players from clubs such as Blackheath and the Royal North Devon Club at Westward Ho!. The Royal Liverpool Club hosted Great Britain's first Amateur Championship in 1885 and the first English Amateur Championship in 1925. The first Scotland-England amateur match was organized in 1902, and it was at Hoylake in 1921 that an unofficial contest between British and U.S. players, a curtain-raiser to the Amateur Championship, was played and served as the genesis of the Walker Cup series.