How Golf Was Invented?
As King of Scots from 1437 until his death in 1460, James II issued an Act of Parliament prohibiting football and golf on March 6, 1457. Rumor has it that Scotsmen have been playing these games in public places like streets and churches instead of practising archery for their required military training.
“No part of the country should football, golf, or other such pointless sports be practiced but, for the common good and for the defense of the country,” stated the ban.
The game of golf is not mentioned in print until this prohibition. But, wait, what was this game? “There is both textual and visual evidence that there was a game that we would call golf,” says Rand Jerris, a prominent golf historian and the former Director of The USGA Golf Museum and Library. A ball game was played over extensive areas of land. The other game involved hitting a ball into a churchyard or down the street as players travelled through the streets of a village or town. In light of this, historians have split the game of golf played in 1500s Scotland into two distinct formats: “short golf” and “long golf.”
Jerris and other golf historians are confident that there is enough evidence to demonstrate that a game involving many clubs being played across considerable distances to a hole in the ground existed by the mid-1500s. A Latin grammar book from the period, when Latin was taught through golf, has been found by historians. The oldest mentions of the sport, including the first mention of a golf hole, may be found in Vocabula, a book that Aberdeen, Scotland schoolmaster David Wedderburn wrote in 1636.
“All the things that we know to be true about the early game—the character of the game and the type of equipment that was used—is because golf is being invoked in a Latin grammar book for schoolchildren,” Jerris said.
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The First Rules of Golf
The Thirteen Articles, or the First Rules of Golf, were established in 1744 by the Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers for their competition at the Leith Links in Edinburgh. These 13 rules were adopted by more than 30 clubs over the course of the following 100 years.
Before the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews (R &A) published the first consolidated rules code in 1899, there had never been an attempt to develop a standardised set of rules. The United States Golf Association was being established in New York City at the same time. The USGA and R&A became the game’s two primary governing bodies as a result of a significant convergence in rule sets.
Jerris claims that a movement to establish sports governing bodies started in the 1880s. One set of rules was opposed by the golfing community. From course to course, the rules of competition varied. Golf didn’t have the momentum and impetus to establish a governing body and bring about game unification until the 1890s, according to Jerris.
Golf has been played in St. Andrews, Scotland, since 1552. The R&A was created here at the St. Andrews Golf Links, which is also where the 18-hole round was pioneered. No documents from the 1500s mention the significance of St. Andrews, but by the time texts describing golf courses exist, it is very evident that St. Andrews is regarded as the pinnacle of what a golf course should be, according to Jerris.
The first known depiction of golf is a 1740s artwork of St. Andrews. In the image, there are two caddies and four golfers. The Old Course at St. Andrews, which is regarded as the oldest course in the world, is a classic Links course, meaning that it is situated on sand dunes along the coast.
Every golf course in the world, according to Jerris, is a replica of the landforms that naturally exist along the Scottish shore.
“Many of the best American courses, like Oakmont and Winged Foot, stole features of the Scottish terrain, reorganised them, and sort of recreated them on an American landscape, where they in most cases naturally had no business being there,” says a golf historian.
Despite the fact that St. Andrews is regarded as the “birthplace of golf,” Chinese historians asserted in the early 2000s that their forefathers played the sport long before the Scots.
In a 2006 show at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, the game of golf, known as chuiwan, or “struck ball,” was played as far back as 1368, according to the exhibit’s curators. An enlarged portion of the Ming Dynasty scroll “The Autumn Banquet,” which depicts members of an imperial court hitting a ball toward a hole in the grass, was on display at the museum.
A book from 1282 called “Wan Jing” (also known as “Manual of the Ball Game”) was also on display. The book set out the rules for a game that was something like golf.
According to these papers, Tom K.C. Ming, chief curator of the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, “chuiwan is extremely comparable to golf.” There is a hole and a green. We were quite startled by how comparable the equipment is when we first viewed it.
Jerris is dubious about the inferences made by the exhibit. A stick and ball game has existed in every culture, he claims. What characteristics of the stick and ball game must exist in order for it to be referred to as golf? In an enclosed court, they played a game where they had to hit a ball at a target. It was a hole in the earth occasionally, but not always. Typically, there was just one club in the images. Therefore, you wouldn’t call it golf if one of your definitions of golf required players to use many clubs, each of which was designed for a particular stroke.
“If it’s played over a large landscape, you know where there are multiple holes, each presenting different challenges, then you can’t really call what they were doing golf.”
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Golf In America
The beginnings of golf in America, however, are firmly associated with Scotland. One of the earliest shipments of golf equipment in the American colonies was received by David Deas, a 21-year-old native of Leith and slave trader, in August 1743. 432 balls and 96 clubs were shipped from the Port of Leith to Charleston. On the Leith Links, a five-hole course where the first golf regulations were written, Deas had grown up playing the sport. Slaves were used as caddies when the South Carolina Golf Club founded Harleston Green in 1841 in a park in Charleston as the first golf club in America.
However, a Dutch ordinance in Fort Orange, New York, which subsequently became Albany, made the first mention of golf in America considerably earlier, in 1659. Because it “greatly damages the windows of the houses, also exposes people to the risk of being harmed, and is contradictory to the freedom of the public streets,” playing the sport in the street was outlawed.
The father of American golf course architects is regarded as Charles Blair MacDonald, who attended St. Andrews University and learnt the sport at the St. Andrews Golf Links. The first 18-hole course in the nation was created by MacDonald in 1893 when he constructed the Chicago Golf Club.
Story of Titleist
With a vision and an x-ray, the Titleist company was founded. One Sunday in 1932, Phil Young, an avid amateur golfer and proprietor of a precision moulded rubber business, lost a match to his friend, the head of the local hospital’s x-ray department, after missing a well-stroked putt. This was the beginning of the Titleist success story.
Young and his opponent visited the hospital, had the golf ball x-rayed, and discovered that the core was in fact out of centre, leading them to believe that the golf ball itself was to blame.
With his finding, Phil Young convinced Fred Bommer—another MIT alumnus, rubber expert, and enthusiastic golfer—to lead the Acushnet Golf Division. They set out to create the highest-quality, best-performing golf ball possible, one whose quality would remain constant and uniform from ball to ball.
The first Titleist golf ball took Young and Bommer three years of arduous work to develop, but when it was finished in 1935, it could legitimately be marketed to club professionals and golfers as the best ball ever created. Young put a process check into place after learning a valuable lesson, and it is still in use today: every Titleist golf ball is x-rayed.
