Golf Quotes

“Field hockey”

“Wikipedia: Golf”

“Golf? Nuts! I never did see any fun in a game, where if I hit a ball, I had to chase it myself.”

“By the early 1900s golf was an essential cultural activity of the British middle and upper classes. Rail companies used golfing destinations such as North Berwick, St. Andrews, and later Carnouystie and Dornoch, to promote golfing holidays and rail travel.”

“In Ireland, modern golf began in Belfast in 1881 in the north and at the Curragh in 1883 in the south. In 1888, a club was founded that became the Royal Portrush Golf Club in 1895 in County Antrim in Northern Ireland. In 1951, it hosted the Open Championship, the only course outside of Great Britain to host the tournament. Royal Portrush is rated one of the best courses in the world.”

“It is worth repeating that the principles of art have little or no connection to the original links of Scotland, although the latter resemble savannas whose wildly undulating terrain represents the opposite or arrangement. In fact, the first classic holes did not arise naturally from the land- but came about when greenkeepers and professionals modified it. Through logical thinking and good taste, these pioneering designers employed principles of art they had probably never heard of.”

“With the development of rail travel, it became possible for clubs to cast a wider net and attract leading golfers to a single tournament. The Prestwick Golf Clubs suggests in 1856 that a Grand National Tournament between all the leading clubs should be held. Clubs agreed to hold the tournament at St. Andrews a year later, in July 1857. The event was organized as a team event with a pair of players from each club playing a knockout competition over 30 holes. Eleven clubs were represented. The pair of George Glennie and John Campbell Stewart of Blackheath took the title, being awarded a silver jug.”

“As the game developed, separate teeing grounds were eventually established and the golf course in the form we know it today gradually began to emerge.
The players relied on the rabbits and the sheep to keep the grass short-cropped, for it was not until the early part of the twentieth century that mechanized grass cutting began to take over from the animals in golf course management. Indeed many of Britain's seaside links, Saunton sands in Devon being a classic example, relied exclusively on rabbits to keep their fairways tightly cropped until well into the second half of the twentieth century when the myxomatosis epidemic of the 1950s killed so many of the rabbits off.”

“Golf course location and design also began to change. By 1914 over 90 percent of courses were inland and the golf course designer came into vogue, led by a quartet of early designers, such as the Heathland Quartet of Willie Park Jr. H.S. Colt, Herbery Forlwer, and J. F. Abercromby. Design and maintenance of grounds, the need for equipment, and operations led to a full-grown golf industry. British demand soon expanded around the world, with dramatic upsurges in gold courses and clubs in North America and continental Europe by 1900 as well as areas of British influence in Asia, Africa, South America, and Australasia. The expansion of golf also provided opportunities for young Scotsmen in particular. It has been estimated that more than 2000 Carnoustie men were hired as professionals by golf clubs around the world by 1900.”

“The game of golf as we know it today did not really emerge from its crude beginnings on the east coast of Scotland until it began to become organised around the middle of the eighteenth century. Clubs began to be formed devoted exclusively to golf, and with them the development of a generally accepted set of rules.
The first golf club for which there is definite proof of origin is the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith, now the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers at Muirfield, instituted in 1744. * There is no record of any rules attaching to the earliest form of the game of golf, although it is safe to assume that there had to be some from the very beginning. It was not until a formal competition among players arrived with the representation to the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith of a silver club from the City Council of Edinburgh for annual competition, that there was a need to agree to a set of rules under which the competition would be played.”

“There were no club makers of course in the early days of the game but golfers found that the skills of the weapons makers could be pressed into service, particularly those of the bow makers who made the bows which King James II was so keen for his populace to use in preference to golf clubs.
The bow makers became the first club makers, manufacturing crude but effective implements first for the wooden balls used until the early seventeenth century, and then more sophisticated clubs to deal with the feather ball, the first major development in golf equipment.
The bow makers who first began the development of the slender, fragile, long-nosed wooden clubs that held sway until the arrival of the gutta percha ball in the middle of the nineteenth century, were club makers in their own right, and examples of the fine work of the best of them, such as McEwan and Philip and Tom Morris himself, command considerable sums in the present day.”

“In the beginning, playing fields were needed for golf, and more space was required than for the somewhat similar games that had preceded it. Early sites took the form of city streets, frozen lakes, and then entrancing seashores. These were crafted by nature and by society, but they were discovered by golfers. As the popularity of golf grew, however, so too did people's desire to shape their playing fields.
In today's game, where professional architects carefully plot and plan every detail of a new layout, it's nearly impossible to comprehend the prospect of "discovering" a ready-made golf course. And today's golfers might not recognize the earliest natural playing fields as being in any way related to today's manicured courses. Nor did the games themselves always resemble golf. There were a variety of forebearers to the game we know today. Some passed in and out of existence; others evolved; others migrated across international borders. Over hundreds of years, those games rattled around like balls ina lottery drawing until, from all of these, came golf.”

“Beginning with pagancia in ancient Rome, golf has had many ancestors in many distant lands, all similar in one way or another to the game we know today. These now long-lost pastimes included chole (soule in Belgium), with similarities to both hockey and gold, kolven in the Netherlands, sometimes played on ice and a game whose name may have evolved into the word "golf"; and pall-mall (also called mail, pele male, jeu de mail), a game played first in the streets of Italy before spreading across Europe and finally arriving in Scotland. The impact of these games on the modern architecture of gold is remote, if it exists as all; yet they made golf possible.
An informative account of these pregolf games is presented by Robert Browning in his History of Golf: The Royal and Ancient Game. He says that "It was the Scots who devised the essential features of gold, the combination of hitting for distance with the final nicety of approach to an exigous mark, and the independent progress of each player with his own ball free from interference by his adversary."”

“In the beginning the golf ball was made of wood, probably of beech, but the feather ball, or 'featherie' came into existence around 1618, marking the first ball improvement in golf.
The feather ball was made in Scotland for more than 200 years until it was superseded by the gutta percha ball in 1848.
It was expensive and easily damaged and the single element that dictated that the game was played in its earliest stages by the wealthier sections of the community who could afford the price of the golf balls.
The task of crafting a featherie was not only arduous for the ball makers of the time, but very detrimental to their health. The ball maker's lungs were filled with feather dust and the constant pressure on the chest of forcing the boiled feathers into the small leather pouch with a special crutch-handled filling rod, took its toll.
Even the most experienced ball maker could only manufacture four geather balls in a day, which accounted for their price of three to four shillings, a huge sum at the time and more even than the cost of a golf club.”

“Although there is no written evidence so far traced of golf before James II's Act of Parliament of 1457, there is no doubt that a form of the game was being played in St Andrews as far back as the thirteenth century and perhaps even further back than that.
However, it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that the game really began to spread outwards from Scottland with the main reason the improvement in the transport system provided by the expanding network in Britain.
The railway gave enthusiasts access to the existing courses in Scotland, and to the newly developed Victorian seaside resorts in England, as well as north of the border. The first trains ran into St Andrews as early as 1850 but towards the latter part of the century, seaside towns built golf courses as an attraction to visitors and the railway gave easy access to them. It is no accident that virtually all of the great links golf courses of Britain have had, or still have, a railway line running along one of their boundaries.
Golf then moved inland where courses were built within train distance of the cities to meet the demand for this newly popular game.”

“Scottish women have made a significant contribution to the development of golf since the middle of the nineteenth century. The Ladies' Golf Club of St Andrews was formed in 1867 and by 1886 there were 500 members.
By 1872, the St Andrews Ladies' Spring and Autumn Meetings had become important events with a gold medal and the Douglas Prize open for competition. Miss Mary Lamb and her sister Miss May Lamb, Miss A. Boothby and Miss F. Hume McLeod were the leading players in the early days of the club and regular winners of the medals.
However, we have to go back much further than that to find the first woman player in Scotland.
That honour belongs to Mary Queen of Scots, mother of James VI of Scotland and I of England, and a notable player around the middle of the sixteenth century. Evidence of her keeness on the game is revealed in the account of one of her matches with one of her attendants, Mary Seaton, which the Queen lost, she presented her conqueror with a famous necklace.
The Queen most famously encountered the wrath of the Church for playing golf on the fields of Seton in 1567 only a few days after the death of her husband, Lord Darnley, father of James VI.”

“Like modern sports generally, golf began to surge in popularity in the latter part of the 19th century, spreading far beyond its Scottish origins. The first Amateur Championship was held in 1885, and this, along with the patronage of leading figures, notably the politician and later Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, led to a middle-class boom in golfing all over Britain and beyond. Real wages rose by over 60 percent between 1870 and 1890, which also expanded the middle class and gave more people disposable income. Golf grew from about 60 clubs in 1870 to nearly 2,800 by 1909. In 1898, the Golfing Annual reported that it could not keep up with development, as 283 clubs reported events in 1897, while 1,750 did so in 1898. Women began to play as well, and there were 30 ladies' clubs by 1890 and 18 courses specifically for women players. By 1914, this had grown to 450 clubs and over 45 courses. In the London area, the 30 golf clubs of 1890 grew to over 300 by 1909, with ease of travel by train, bicycle, and automobile making more and more courses possible and accessible. Similar factors helped golf's expansion in the United States, with the 16 clubs of 1893 ballooning to 1,040 by 1901.”

“According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “[T]he average American family of four uses 400 gallons of water per day.” The average golf course uses 312,000 gallons of water, according to Audobon International, meaning each one uses as much water as 780 families of four. In Palm Springs—immediately adjacent to a place called Palm Desert—NPR reported that each of the city's 57 courses use about a million gallons a day, or about the same as 2,500 families of four.
Looking statewide, the numbers really get fun. California is second only to Florida in the number of golf courses it has: 921. Together, those courses use as much water as 2.8 million people, or about 7 percent of the state's population. While middle-class homeowners risk fines for watering their lawns, millions upon millions of gallons of water are wasted every day on a boring leisure sport for the wealthy.
“Golf courses are a huge problem,” said Adam Keats of the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group. And part of that huge problem is the people who play it. “They're a wealthy elite that have no connection to want or lack,” Keats, head of the center's California Water Law Project, told me over the phone. “Golfers live in a world of excess.””

“Wherever they traveled Scotts took their favorite pastime with them. They set up courses and founded golf clubs. None made a more significant contribution to the mass explosion of golf in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, than two expatriate Scottish school friends from Dunfermline in Fife, John Reid and Robert Lockhart, although neither is likely to have realised it at the time. Reid is regarded as the 'father of American golf', as we will see later, but Lockhart had a significant part to play as well.
While Reid was introducing golf to the United States, essentially for the first time, the game was spreading like wildfire in the British Isles. Scottish professionals were imported south of the border into England and to Ireland and Wales to lay out courses to meet the new demand for the game.
A measure of the demand for their services is the huge increase evident in the number of golf clubs founded in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Prior to that period the majority of clubs were in Scotland. In 1864 there were about 30 golf clubs in Scotland while in england there were only three - Royal Blackheath, old Machester and Westward Ho! By 1880 there were 60 clubs in Britain; by 1890 there were 387 and by the start of the new millennium Britain had almost 2500 clubs. The Scots pioneers had done their work well.”

“The National Insurance Act of 1923 forced many clubs to cease direct employment of caddies. Improved course management and greens keeping forced smaller and weaker clubs to cease operations as players gravitated to the best courses. The expansion of motor car use also affected the rail companies. The line through Ayrshire to Turnberry ceased operation in 1930, for example. The Great Depression of the 1930s followed by World War II, and austerity measures of the 1950s had a negative impact on golf, as economic hard times and war limited the numbers who could play. War measures meant that lesser-used rail lines and old golf clubs were collected to add to steel needed for the war effort. Many clubhouses were used by the military, and gasoline rationing meant that clubs could not cut fairways of greens as frequently as they would like. Even the 9-hole course that Andrew Carnegie had constructed as Skibo Castle near Dornoch was used for food production during the war. Other courses suffered similar fates. Some courses like St. Andrews and Dunbar survived by using the courses for sheep or cattle grazing. Turnberry's course was temporarily converted to an air field. Consequently, British golfing performances at the top level also suffered. There was a brief revival in the late 1930s and again in the 1980s, which coincided with improved success by British and Irish golfers in tournament play.”