The story of golf: from the links of Scotland to the Olympic Games

A game the king tried to stop

The modern game is generally considered a Scottish invention, growing up on the coastal links from the Middle Ages onwards. Its first written appearance is a prohibition. In 1457 an Act of the Scottish Parliament under King James II banned golf and football, because both were drawing men away from archery practice.

The bans did not hold. They were repeated in 1471 and 1491, when golf was dismissed as "an unprofitable sport", yet by 1502 clubs and balls were being bought for King James IV himself on a visit to Perth, and again on later visits to St Andrews and Edinburgh. Mary, Queen of Scots played as well; after her husband’s death in 1567 she was accused of playing "pell-mell and golf" at Seton Palace.

The word itself probably crossed the North Sea. The Scots "gowf" is usually thought to come from the Dutch "colf" or "colve", meaning a stick or club.

The first rules, written at Leith

Golf was being played on public links around Edinburgh long before anyone wrote down how. Sir John Foulis of Ravelston recorded a round at Musselburgh Links on 2 March 1672, the entry that lets the Old Links at Musselburgh claim to be the oldest playing course, a claim Guinness World Records certifies. In January 1687 a medical student, Thomas Kincaid, described his stroke in his diary after playing at Bruntsfield and Leith, the earliest known instructions for the game.

The decisive step came in 1744. The Company of Gentlemen Golfers, later the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, wrote thirteen rules for its first competition at Leith Links, played for a Silver Club.

These Leith Rules are the oldest that survive, and every later code grew from them; one still reads simply, "Your Tee must be upon the ground." The surgeon John Rattray won that first Silver Club and hung a silver ball engraved with his name from the trophy, beginning a tradition the club has kept ever since.

“Your Tee must be upon the ground.” The Leith Rules, 1744

St Andrews and the eighteen holes

Ten years later, in 1754, the Society of St Andrews Golfers was founded on the Fife coast. King William IV recognised it as "Royal and Ancient" in 1834, and the R&A, as it is now known, became one of the two bodies that write the game’s rules.

St Andrews also gave golf its length. In 1764 several short holes on the links were joined together, taking the links from eleven holes to nine, so that a full round out and back became eighteen. Because St Andrews was the capital of the game, other courses followed, and eighteen holes remain the standard to this day.

The links themselves have a long public story: their history reaches back to a charter of 1552, and the Links Charter still speaks of the right of the people of St Andrews to play there. The Old Course is considered the oldest golf course in the world.

Feathers, gutta-percha and rubber

For centuries the ball was a featherie: a hand-sewn leather pouch stuffed with chicken or goose feathers and painted, usually white. Tradition held that a gentleman’s top hat full of feathers made one ball. They were costly, and they did not last.

In 1848 the Rev. Robert Adams Paterson invented the gutta-percha ball. The "guttie" of the 1850s and 1860s was cheaper to mass-produce, more durable and more consistent than the feather-filled balls before it. The next change came from Ohio in 1898, when Coburn Haskell wound rubber thread into a ball while waiting at a factory in Akron, and Bertram Work suggested putting a cover on it. Haskell’s wound ball became the golf ball of the twentieth century.

Clubs changed more slowly. Hickory became the standard wood for shafts and American persimmon the choice for heads. Steel shafts, patented in 1910, were allowed by the USGA in 1924; the R&A kept its ban until 1929.

Across the border, and across the sea

Golf travelled south with a king. After James VI of Scotland became King of England, golf was played at Blackheath, near London, from about 1603, and Royal Blackheath Golf Club traces its origins to those years; the club itself gives 1608 as its founding date. England was slow to follow.

Westward Ho! in Devon, founded in 1864, was the first new club in England since Blackheath, but the game then spread quickly: there were 12 courses in England in 1880 and 50 by 1887. On the Continent, the Pau Golf Club in south-west France, founded in 1856, is the oldest.

In America, golf equipment was shipped to Charleston, South Carolina, as early as 1739, and a South Carolina Golf Club existed by 1787.

The modern American game was organised in 1894, when delegates from Saint Andrew’s Golf Club of Yonkers, Newport, The Country Club, Chicago Golf Club and Shinnecock Hills met in New York City and formed the United States Golf Association, first of all to settle a national amateur championship. Together with the R&A, the USGA still writes and interprets the rules.

A game for everyone, and for the Olympics

Women’s golf had its own governing body from 1893, when the Ladies’ Golf Union was founded for women’s and girls’ amateur golf in Great Britain and Ireland. It was based in St Andrews, and merged with the R&A at the start of 2017.

Golf first appeared at the Summer Olympic Games in 1900 and was played again in 1904. More than a century later, in October 2009, the International Olympic Committee voted to bring it back, and golf returned at the 2016 Games. The most recent change touches every club golfer: the R&A and the USGA announced in February 2018 a single World Handicap System, launched in 2020, so that one handicap now travels from course to course and country to country.