The first written mention of golf in Scotland is a 1457 order to stop playing it. These stories run from there to the modern majors: a round cut from 22 holes to 18 by one committee, a French champion whose daughter was named for his victory, a scorecard error that cost a Masters playoff, and a course stretched across 1,365 kilometers of the Australian outback.
Every tile in a Golf game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Champions
nine stories
1The teenage champion and the first reported ace
On the tile: Young Tom1868-1872
Tom Morris Jr. was 17 years and 156 days old when he won the 1868 Open at Prestwick, beating his own father by three strokes. No younger player has won it since. On September 16, 1869, he made a hole in one at Prestwick's 166-yard eighth, the Station hole, which Prestwick Golf Club calls almost certainly the first reported ace. His scorecard was later wrongly altered to read 1868, but a newspaper report published a week after the ace confirms 1869. In all, he won four Opens in a row.
For the first 29 Open Championships, no amateur and no Englishman won. Then in 1890 John Ball, an amateur from Hoylake, won at Prestwick by three strokes, becoming the first amateur champion and the first English-born one. Earlier that year he had also won the Amateur Championship on his home course. The Open's own history says only Bobby Jones, in 1930, has repeated that double, and it credits Ball's win with starting the Open's evolution into a national, and eventually international, event.
The overlapping grip, with a little finger resting over the other hand, is still called the Vardon grip, and many assume Harry Vardon invented it. He did not. The Open's profile says he popularized a grip a few others already used, and the Golf Heritage Society notes that the Scottish amateur Johnny Laidlay, Amateur champion in 1889 and 1891, is widely credited with it. Vardon, a former caddie from Jersey, earned his fame another way: six Open titles between 1896 and 1914, a record still unmatched.
At his first Open, at Deal in 1920, Walter Hagen was told he could not enter the clubhouse. So he changed his shoes in a Daimler in the parking lot, and he finished 53rd. Two years later at Royal St George's he won by one stroke. The Claret Jug had gone to an American the year before, but Hagen was the first U.S.-born player to win it. He added three more Open titles and finished his career with 11 major championships.
5He walked off the Old Course, then won its freedom
On the tile: Bobby Jones1921-1958
In the third round of the 1921 Open at St Andrews, 19-year-old Bobby Jones struggled and withdrew. He returned to the Old Course in 1927, opened with a 68 and won by six strokes. In 1930 he became the only man to win all four major titles in one season, then retired from competition at 28 to practice law, and later founded Augusta National. In 1958 St Andrews granted him its freedom, an honor The Open says only one other American had received: Benjamin Franklin.
At the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, Babe Didrikson won gold in the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin and silver in the high jump. Then she took up golf. In 1945 she qualified for the Los Angeles Open, a PGA Tour event against men, and made the first cut before missing the second. She won the 1946 U.S. Women's Amateur, helped found the LPGA in 1950, and in 1954, after surgery for colon cancer, won the U.S. Women's Open by 12 strokes. She won 82 golf tournaments in all.
Ben Hogan played the Open Championship exactly once. In 1953, having already won the Masters and the U.S. Open, he arrived at Carnoustie a week early to practice with the smaller 1.62-inch ball, which he had never used. He improved every round, 73, 71, 70 and a course-record 68, and won by four strokes. Carnoustie's sixth became known as Hogan's Alley for the way he threaded his drives there. No one matched his three majors in a year until Tiger Woods in 2000.
Sam Snead and Tiger Woods are famous for their victory totals on the PGA Tour, but the record for tour wins belongs to Kathy Whitworth. Born in Monahans, Texas, and mentored by Harvey Penick among others, she won 88 LPGA tournaments, more than anyone on the PGA Tour or the LPGA Tour. She also took six major championships and was LPGA Player of the Year seven times. In July 1981 she became the first woman golfer to reach one million dollars in career earnings.
At the 16th hole of the 1979 Open at Royal Lytham, Seve Ballesteros drove his ball into an overflow parking lot. He got a free drop and still made birdie. The 22-year-old Spaniard went on to win, becoming the youngest Open champion of the 20th century and the first from mainland Europe since 1907. He had already finished second as a 19-year-old in 1976, and he won twice more: at St Andrews in 1984 and back at Royal Lytham in 1988.
The Old Course at St Andrews once had a 22-hole round, with most holes played going out and again coming in. On October 4, 1764, the Society of St Andrews Golfers, known today as the R&A, decided that the first four holes should be converted into two, which cut the round to 18. Other links had 5, 7 or 12 holes, but by the mid-19th century St Andrews was the blueprint. The R&A's rules of 1842 reckoned 18 holes a match, though the Rules of Golf set no stipulated round until 1950.
On March 2, 1672, Sir John Foulis noted a sum he had lost at golf at Musselburgh, spelling it Musselboorgh, while playing with friends. That entry is firm evidence of golf on the town's links, which Guinness once listed as the world's oldest golf course. The local golf club, later Royal Musselburgh, offered prizes for a golf competition among the town's fishwives on New Year's Day in 1811. Between 1874 and 1889 the links hosted the Open Championship six times.
3The first international match that probably was not golf
On the tile: Leith Linksc. 1681Myth busted
A favorite Edinburgh tale says golf's first international match was played on Leith Links around 1681, after two English noblemen claimed golf as an English game. The Duke of York supposedly partnered a cobbler named John Paterson, who won enough to buy a house known as Golfers Land. Recent research has cast serious doubt on it. The contest was probably archery, and the Paterson family already owned the house, which was called Paterson's Land in the 1770s and renamed only in the 19th century.
Around 1527, according to his obituary in the Registrum of Panmure, Sir Robert Maule exercised at golf and often went to Barry Links, near today's Carnoustie. Where exactly he played is anyone's guess, because the coastline has moved over the centuries. Old Tom Morris later helped redesign the course, and an 18-hole layout opened in 1873. Carnoustie also exported golfers. Between 1898 and 1930, it is said, more than 150 club professional posts in North America were held by people from Carnoustie.
The earliest written trace of golf at Dornoch is an expense account for the young Earl of Sutherland: ten pounds for bows, arrows, golf clubs and balls. Royal Dornoch dates it to 1616, and some historians cite 1619. His uncle and tutor, Sir Robert Gordon, later wrote that Dornoch's links were the fairest and largest in Scotland, far surpassing those of Montrose and St Andrews, perhaps golf's first recorded travel boast. Dornoch also produced Donald Ross, born there in 1872, who emigrated to America in 1899 and designed hundreds of courses, including Pinehurst No. 2.
Augusta National was built on Fruitland, a former 365-acre nursery near Augusta, Georgia, and each hole on the course is named for the tree or shrub it has become associated with. Bobby Jones and the financier Clifford Roberts founded the club, and its tournament began in 1934 with a plain name, the Augusta National Invitation Tournament. It officially became the Masters in 1939. Roberts also pioneered the over-and-under-par scoring system that golf still uses.
7The Open's first trip beyond Scotland and England
On the tile: Royal Portrush1951
In 1951 the Open was held outside Scotland or England for the first time, at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. Max Faulkner, known for brightly colored clothes, took a six-stroke lead into the final round, and the story goes that he signed an autograph as Open Champion before he had won. Some credit that tale to his newspaper ghostwriter. Faulkner did win, by two strokes. The Open did not return to Northern Ireland until 2019, and Britain waited until 1969 for its next homegrown champion.
The PGA Tour paid one dollar for TPC Sawgrass. Landowners Jerome and Paul Fletcher sold it 415 acres of wooded wetlands and swamp, and Pete Dye designed the Stadium Course there, which opened in 1980. Its most famous hole came from his wife, Alice. Dye credited her with the idea of an island green after she saw the construction site. The 17th is only 137 yards long, yet an estimated 100,000 balls are retrieved from the water around it every year.
Royal Troon's eighth hole, the Postage Stamp, is just 123 yards long, the shortest hole played in the Open. In 1923 Gene Sarazen failed to come through qualifying at Troon for the Open. Fifty years later, in 1973, he came back at 71 and made a hole in one there with a five-iron. The next day he holed a bunker shot on the same hole for a two. Sarazen said he could think of no better way to close the books on his tournament play than an ace on the Postage Stamp.
Before gutta-percha arrived in the late 1840s, golf balls were stuffed by hand. A featherie maker stitched three pieces of leather together, turned the case inside out and pushed feathers in through a quarter-inch slit. Early reports say a maker managed two or three balls a day, and in 1838 the New Statistical Account of Scotland estimated that an expert could make 50 to 60 a week. A top-quality ball sold for five shillings. With Tom Morris as his apprentice, Allan Robertson made 1,021 featheries in 1840 and 2,456 in 1844.
From 1848, featheries began giving way to balls molded from gutta-percha gum. The traditional story says a St Andrews divinity student, Robert Adams Paterson, received a package wrapped in the stuff in 1843 and tried shaping it into a ball. The first gutties were smooth, but players noticed that nicked, blemished balls performed better, so makers began cutting regular grooves into new ones. At one shilling, a fifth of the price of a good featherie, the gutty helped bring golf to the masses.
The ball that ended the gutty era was wound like a ball of yarn. Coburn Haskell of Cleveland developed it in 1898 and patented it in 1899: a solid core wrapped tightly in rubber thread under a gutta-percha cover. It flew farther and lowered scores. Sandy Herd first tried one in a practice round before the 1902 Open at Hoylake, played it in the championship and beat Harry Vardon and James Braid by a stroke. After his victory, The Open says, everyone started using it.
Early golfers teed up on a little mound of sand, often scooped by caddies from the bottom of the hole, until clubs set out sand boxes. Inventors tried to do better. In 1899 George F. Grant, a Boston dentist, patented a tapered wooden peg with a flexible rubber-tube head, which could be pulled up after each drive and used again. The tee that finally caught on came from another dentist, William Lowell, whose Reddy Tee was invented at Maplewood Golf Club in 1921.
The first known rules of golf exist because of a prize. In 1744 Edinburgh's town council presented a silver club for a competition on Leith Links and insisted that the golfers write rules for it. The Gentlemen Golfers of Edinburgh drew up 13 Articles and Laws. The first reads, "You must Tee your Ball, within a Club's length of the Hole." Another barred a player from marking his path to the hole with his club. Golfers at St Andrews adopted the rules in 1754.
The width of every golf hole traces back to one tool. In 1829 the golf club at Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, bought a mechanical hole cutter from a blacksmith named Robert Gay for one pound. The holes it cut were four and a quarter inches across, about 108 millimeters. In the 1890s the R&A adopted that measurement as a requirement for all courses, and the Musselburgh cutter's width is still the size of the hole today.
Today a bogey means one over par, but it began as a target score. In 1890 Hugh Rotherham of Coventry Golf Club devised a ground score, the strokes a good golfer should need at each hole. When Dr. Browne, secretary of the Great Yarmouth club, adopted the idea, a golfer there called that imaginary opponent a regular Bogey man, probably after a popular song. At the United Services Club in Gosport, where every member held a military rank, the phantom player was given one too: Colonel Bogey. In the 20th century, starting in America, the word slid to one over par.
A popular joke claims GOLF stands for Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden. It does not. Scottish golf historians call the acronym a 20th-century joke, and the word is centuries older. Old Scottish documents spell it goff, gowf, golf, goif, gouff and golve, among other ways, and gowfe, pronounced gouf, was probably the most common. Scholars link the word to the Dutch kolven, the game of kolf, and to the Middle High German kolbe, meaning club.
A romantic story says caddies began in France, where military cadets carried clubs for golfing royalty, and that Mary, Queen of Scots, brought the custom home in 1561. Scottish golf historians dismiss it, noting that the French played a one-club game called maile, not golf. The word does come from the French le cadet, meaning the youngest of a family, and in Scotland it was used for porters before golfers claimed it. Edinburgh's caddies formed a society in 1711, with rules and published fees much like taxis.
The earliest recorded mention of golf in Scotland is an order to stop playing it. In 1457 King James II's parliament banned golf and football, because men were supposed to spend their spare time on archery practice. The ban was repeated in 1471 and 1491, which suggests it did not entirely work. By 1502 King James IV had lifted it, believing the threat from England had faded, and when he visited Perth that year a set of costly hand-crafted clubs was bought for him.
The first Open Championship, played at Prestwick in 1860, was not really open. The idea came from the Earl of Eglinton and Colonel James Fairlie of the Prestwick club, and the invitations went to the best professionals, who were essentially caddies who also played. Eight of them took part on a 12-hole course. There was no prize money, only the Challenge Belt, made of red Moroccan leather with silver panels. Willie Park Sr. won it with 174, two strokes ahead of Tom Morris.
The Open's famous trophy arrived a year late. Young Tom Morris won the original prize, the Challenge Belt, outright with his third straight victory in 1870, and no championship was held in 1871. Prestwick, the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club then agreed to share the event, and a silver jug was made in Edinburgh. It was not ready for the 1872 Open, so the first champion handed the Claret Jug was Tom Kidd, a St Andrews caddie, in 1873. Young Tom's name was engraved for 1872.
4The 1896 U.S. Open went on, protest or no protest
On the tile: John Shippen1896
Before the 1896 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, foreign-born professionals held a protest meeting and threatened to withdraw if two local entrants played: John Shippen, a Black teenager who assisted the club's professional, Willie Dunn, and his friend Oscar Bunn, a Shinnecock Indian. USGA president Theodore Havemeyer told the protesters they could leave or stay, but the tournament would be played with Shippen and Bunn. Everyone competed the next morning. Shippen shot 78 and 81, finishing seven strokes behind the winner, James Foulis.
5The first overseas champion named his baby Hoylake
On the tile: Arnaud Massy1907
In 1907 at Hoylake, Arnaud Massy of France beat J.H. Taylor by two strokes in strong winds and became the first Open champion from overseas. He had started out hitting left-handed at home in Biarritz, then switched to right-handed after moving to North Berwick in Scotland to sharpen his game. His Scottish-born wife had given birth that week, so Massy hurried home, and the baby girl was named Margot Hoylake in honor of the victory. He remains France's only Open champion.
Francis Ouimet grew up across the street from the 17th hole of The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, and began caddying there at nine. In 1913, as a 20-year-old amateur, he tied Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, then considered the top two players in the world, for the U.S. Open and beat them in a playoff. His caddie, Eddie Lowery, was 10. In the next decade the number of American golfers tripled. In 1951 Ouimet became the first American elected captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club.
Roberto De Vicenzo, the Open champion the year before, played the final round of the 1968 Masters on his 45th birthday and scored well enough to tie Bob Goalby. But Tommy Aaron, marking his card, had written a 4 instead of a 3 on the 17th hole, and De Vicenzo signed without catching it. Under the rules the signed score stood, so his 65 became a 66, and Goalby won by a stroke with no playoff. De Vicenzo summed it up: "What a stupid I am."
In February 1971, near the end of Apollo 14's time on the Moon, Alan Shepard fixed a six-iron head to the handle of a tool meant for collecting samples. He had carried the club head in his spacesuit pocket. The suit was so stiff that he had to swing one-handed. He hit two balls. His first swing mostly buried one in the dust, but a later swing connected, and he called out, "Miles and miles and miles." Shepard brought the club head home, and it went on display at the U.S. Golf Association.
At the 1999 Open at Carnoustie, Paul Lawrie started the final round 10 strokes off the lead, double the previous record comeback. Ranked 241st in the world, he shot 67 and waited. Jean van de Velde reached the 72nd tee three strokes ahead, but his second shot bounced off a grandstand railing into deep rough. He chipped into the Barry Burn, found a bunker and made a triple-bogey seven. Lawrie then beat Van de Velde and Justin Leonard in a playoff, finishing with two birdies.