What is Golf? The World and History of Golf

The History of the Sport of Golf

Golf is a sport in which individual players or teams hit a ball into a hole using a variety of clubs. It is one of the few ball games that does not use a fixed, standard playing field or area. While similar games can be traced back to China and the Netherlands, modern golf is considered to be of Scottish origin. The Rules of Golf have international standards and are jointly overseen by The Royal And Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews (R & A) and the United States Golf Association (USGA). The basic principle governing the game is stated on the back cover of the official rule book: “play the ball as it lies, play the course as you find it, and if you cannot do that, do what is fair.” There are at least 20 professional golf tours, the most prestigious of which is the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) Tour, which attracts the best golfers from all other men's tours, with most PGA Tour events having first prizes of at least US$800,000.

The four most prestigious annual men's tournaments are: The Masters, the U.S. Open, The Open Championship (to be referred to as the British Open in North America), and the PGA Championship. While the U.S.-based Champions Tour has five annual major events for its senior players, there is no universally agreed-upon set of majors in women’s golf. There are approximately 35,000 golf courses in the world of golf, with about half of them located in the United States, where the popularity of golf has begun to grow rapidly. After a 112-year absence from the Olympic Games, golf returned for the 2016 Rio Games.

Ming Emperor Xuande Possibly Playing Golf

Golf is a very old game whose exact origins are unclear. The term golf is derived from the Dutch word kolf or kolve, which literally means club. By the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, the Dutch term became goff or gouff in the Scottish dialect, but it was not until after the sixteenth century that it became golf. The linguistic links between the Dutch and Scottish terms are attributed to the very active trade that took place between Dutch ports and Scottish east coast ports from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. A game similar to golf was mentioned in the Dōngxuān Records, a Chinese book from the early eleventh century. In the Netherlands, the Dutch played a game similar to golf called het earlier, which was played with sticks and a leather ball and was recorded as early as 1297. The winner of this game was the person who hit the ball the most times to a target several hundred yards away. Some scholars suggest that the Dutch game of kolf was brought to the east coast of Scotland by Dutch sailors and that it was transferred to public links (coastal parks) and eventually became the game known today.