Many people have asked why golf courses have eighteen holes.

The early golf courses all had different numbers of holes.

Leith Links had 5 holes in 1744 when the Honourable Company, as they would come to be known, held the world’s first recorded golf competition. They added 2 holes later.

Blackheath followed Leith in having 5 holes and expanding to 7 holes.

Bruntsfield Links also had 5 holes at this time, but, because of space, could only expand to 6 holes in 1818. 

Musselburgh Old Course had 7 holes for many years, added an 8th in 1832 and a 9th in 1870. 

Montose Links had 7 holes by 1810; 14 holes by 1825; 11 holes by 1849; and 25 holes by 1866, though these were reduced sometime shortly after 1874.

St Andrews (Old Course) had 12 holes by 1764, and probably much earlier. The holes were laid out in a line and 10 holes were played twice — once ‘out’ and once back ‘in’, making a ’round’ of 22 holes. 

However, in 1764, the golfers decided to combine the first four holes into two, which produced a round of 18 holes, though it was really 10 holes of which 8 were played twice.

Therefore, when Prestwick was built in 1851 with only 12 holes, it did not look out of place.

By 1857 however, St Andrews had put second holes in the 8 double greens of the Old Course, creating a proper round of 18 holes, and in 1858 the St Andrews club laid down a round of 18 holes for matches between its own members.

{ Scottish Golf History | Continue reading }

When golf clubs in the UK formally recognized the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews as the rule-making body for the sport in the late 1890s, it became necessary for many clubs to expand or reduce the length of their course to eighteen holes. Prior to this time, courses ranged in length from six holes to upward of 20 holes. However, if golfers were to play by the official R&A rules, then their appointed round would consist of 18 holes.

{ USGA | Continue reading }

Related: 18=6+6+6, and 666 is the number of the devil. In chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation it is in the verse 18 in which the book talks about the number 666. There are also 18 letters in the words “six-hundred sixty six.”

related { Apparatus for ultimate attainment of an ideal golf swing, 1949 | More Americans are giving up golf }

A golfer lost his memory after hitting a hole-in-one. Wang, 50, was playing golf with friends at a course in Xinzu city, Taiwan, when it happened.

“The ball flew and dropped directly into the hole, which is a standard three-par hole,” said one of his friends. Wang was initially overjoyed - but when his friends picked up the ball and came to congratulate him they found him muttering on a hill and asking: “Why am I here?”

He was sent to the hospital immediately and doctors diagnosed him as suffering a blackout or temporary memory loss. After a couple of hours of rest, Wang’s memory was pieced together again, but his golfing success was still missing. When Wang revisited the doctor a week later, he still didn’t remember the hole-in-one.

{ Taiwan News /Ananova }

The title of my next book is “The Ubiquitous Persuaders” because advertising is now everywhere… We’re fucking drowning in it. You cannot escape it. Thirty years ago, Howard Gossage said “There’s too much advertising!” Fuck knows what he’d say about the situation today.

I just read that the world’s dumbest pastime, golf, (I’m with George Carlin on that) is starting to put something called The ProLink Solutions GPS system in golf carts to allow advertisers to participate in a rewards card program with which golfers can respond to ads on the golf cart GPS screen. Players receive their awards card at the pro shop. A text messaging program urges golfers to visit advertiser websites and enter contests. I mean, c’mon, these fuckers are too lazy to walk around the course, what makes these bozos think they’re going to have the energy to lift a finger and touch a screen, which will probably be unreadable on a bright sunny day anyway?

{ George Parker | Continue reading }

Stroudsburg Area Regional Police are investigating complaints of a private golf outing featuring lap dance stations, threesomes and naked women at the Cherry Valley Golf Course on Monday.

Neighbors called police after Dave Gold, 20, and a 17-year-old female were denied access to the road shared by the golf course and the home of Gold’s friend, Will Croasdale, 19.

Gold said an employee of the course told him a private golf tournament was taking place, and the road was closed.

When Gold argued, he said he was first told by the employee “I’ll kick your ass,” followed by “I’ll break your neck.”

Gold and Croasdale shot videotape and still photos of the activities on the course from Cherry Valley Road, which showed partially clothed females performing lap dances for golfers and sex acts on each other. (…)

“It’s not clear whether any laws were broken,” according to SARP officer Paul Gasper. { Pocono Records | Continue reading }

{ Tera Patrick photographed by Mario Sorrenti | Richardson magazine, A3 }

{ ThrillingWonder }

When she moved into her retirement condominium on a golf course, Eleanor Weiner admired the lush, pristine views of the fairways and greens, a landscape she never had to mow or maintain. Not long after, as she prepared dinner, a golf ball shattered the kitchen window, whistled past her head and crashed through the glass on her oven door. Ms. Weiner retrieved the ball from her oven and stalked outside to confront the golfer who had launched the missile.

“He told me that’s what I get for living on a golf course,” said Ms. Weiner, who has lived for a dozen years alongside Rancho Las Palmas Country Club near Palm Springs, Calif. “That was the first time I heard that, but it surely hasn’t been the last.”

The intersection of errant golf shots and private property is not a new phenomenon. But with new gear that enables average golfers to hit a ball 250 yards, and with golf communities sprouting nationwide — 70 percent of new courses include housing — it is becoming an increasingly prominent problem. (…)

In Rehoboth, Mass., Joyce Amaral collected 1,800 golf balls from her property abutting Middlebrook Country Club, then lugged them into court when she sued the club. Ms. Amaral’s house was hit so regularly, her landscapers wore hard hats. Balls set off the burglar alarm and dented her car.
Although the club existed decades before the house was built, a court ruled that the balls — and the golfers looking for them — were a trespass. The parties settled this month, with the club agreeing to shorten the No. 9 hole, which should keep the Amaral property out of the line of fire.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

I’m constantly reminded that programming is a lot like golf. Many times the work done early in a project is a lot like hitting the ball down the fairway with a driver. You get that satisfying feeling of making progress in huge chunks, and everything feels grand.

But no matter how easy it is to get close to the hole, you have to make those seemingly easy putts in order to finish, and the small bits at the end can wind up costing you just as much as the big chunks of progress did early in the project.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve spent hours working on something that turned out to be a one character fix. The difference between “and” and “or” can mean thousands of dollars in lost revenue. { Rafe Colburn’s weblog | Continue reading }

skur88
An American business man takes a short business trip to Japan. He arrives on a Sunday night, with meetings on that Tuesday. Since he is in a foreign land, and is bored with nothing to do, he calls up a prostitute service. A Japanese woman arrives at the door with in the hour, and the two proceed to have sex with eachother. The woman is on top, and the entire time all she says is “hoshimoto.” The man doesn’t know what to think, since he doesn’t understand what she’s saying, but the woman appears to be having a good time, so they continue. After the climax, the man pays the woman and she leaves.

The next day, the American decides to play golf with some of the Japanese people he will be meeting with the next day. The round is relatively standard except for the 18th hole. When it is the American man’s turn to drive, he hits a hole in one. All the Japanese people start yelling in celebration, and the American doesn’t know what to say, so he says the first Japanese word that pops into his head, “hoshimoto.” One of the Japanese business men looks at him, and in a thick accent says: “What do you mean, ‘wrong hole’?”

i’m not the best joke teller so this could probably be phrased better…

earthboundkid
A) I think it’s just made up psuedo-Japanese, since hoshii motto is grammatically bizarre.
B) It’s ana (穴 or 孔) not ano that means hole in Japanese.

fnord123
I’m pretty sure hoshimoto is hoshii motto, which means “I want more”. I think you want “chigai ano.”

{ reddit }

photo { David LaChapelle}

Why does a golf ball have dimples? There are two types of drag experienced by a sphere. The first is the obvious drag due to friction. This only accounts for a small part of the drag experienced by a ball. The majority of the drag comes from the separation of the flow behind the ball and is known as pressure drag due to separation. For laminar flow past a sphere, the flow separates very early (top figure). However, for a turbulent flow, separation is delayed (bottom). Notice the difference in the size of the separation region behind the spheres. The separation region in the turbulent case is much smaller than in the laminar case. (…) The surface roughness caused the flow to transition from laminar to turbulent. The turbulent flow has more energy than the laminar flow and thus, the flow stays attached longer. { more aerodynamics | Construction of golf balls }

On February 5, 1971, a decade after becoming the first American to rocket into space, Alan B. Shepard Jr. went to the moon aboard Apollo 14. During a break in lunar experiments he used a makeshift golf club to smack a golf ball “miles and miles and miles” toward the horizon. {CNN }

Nike has released a series of short videos to promote their new golf ball, the Juice 312. The Juice ball is designed to fly further than any other golf ball. To demonstrate this, they’re firing the ball at high velocity through…stuff. They’ve already got videos demonstrating the ball flying through a cake, a jello mold, and a lava lamp. { BeyondMadisonAvenue.com }