If you like golf trivia, here are a dozen snippets of information that you can regale to your fellow players when you next get together out on the course, at the 19th hole, or in your home golf studio.
- If you struggle to break 90 during a round, you are far from alone. 80% of golfers fail to hit that magic mark.
- Manage this and you’ll join an extremely short of list of golfers – 4 to be precise. That’s the rare number of players in the history of the game who have made a hole in one on a par 5. It’s known as a condor, incidentally.
- Two sports have been attempted on the moon. Golf being one, the other javelin throwing (not sure where they got the javelins from!)
- How’s your long putting? Well, you’d have to sink one from at least 395 feet to beat the longest ever putt that’s listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.
- Walk an 18-hole course, which is normally around 4 miles long and you’ll burn about 2,000 calories! (That’s assuming you hit the ball straight most of the time!)
- Sano, Japan is where you’ll find the world’s longest hole in golf, measuring is a gargantuan 964-yards. You’ll achieve a par as long as you get down in seven shots.
- If you struggle with hitting the ball long distances, the world’s highest course – where the air is thin and ball travel is accentuated – might suit you. It stands at 14,355 above sea level.
- The term “birdie” originated in America. Around the turn of the 20th century, the term “bird” was slang for something outstanding. A golfer named Abner Smith, playing at Atlantic City Country Club, used the phrase “a bird of a shot” after hitting a particularly good one. From that point, the word morphed into the term “birdie”, meaning one under par.
- Before golf tees were invented, golfers would use mounds of sand to tee up the ball.
- They say lightning never strikes twice. But that’s the number of times that the famous American player, Lee Trevino, has been struck
- Every year, 125,000 golf balls splash into the water surrounding the iconic 17th island hole at TPC Sawgrass, the course that hosts the Players’ Championship (the so-called 5th major).
- Although there’s a myth in circulation that the word golf is short for ‘Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden’ this is purely conjecture. Its most likely origin is from the Scottish word ‘gowf’ meaning “to strike or cut off”. Given that golf was first played in Scotland, this seems entirely plausible.
