Golf: the origins

Golf is an outdoor precision sport in which players use clubs to hit a ball into a hole. The aim is to complete a set course in as few strokes as possible. Precision, endurance, technique and mental strength are essential. Golf is played on a grass course with clubs — irons and woods, including the legendary driver, a large-headed 1-wood — and, of course, golf balls.

Golf only really took off in the second half of the 19th century, with the spread of courses, professionalism and private clubs in Scotland and then England, where the first British Open for professionals was held in 1860. Its growth continued into the early 20th century and around the First World War, which reshaped the world order: the Americans ended British dominance. Other nations followed — South Africa, Germany, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Australia — and golf became global by the end of the 20th century.

On 9 October 2009, golf became an Olympic sport once again, included in the programme of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games.

A fast-growing sport

In 2005 there were 32,000 golf courses worldwide, half of them in the United States. Ranked by courses per inhabitant, the leading countries were Scotland, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Canada, Wales, the United States, Sweden and England (counting only countries with more than 500,000 inhabitants). Apart from Sweden, all are English-speaking, but the ranking may change as golf grows rapidly, especially in Asia: China opened its first course in 1980 and had more than 200 by 2005.

As courses multiply, so do players: more than 61 million worldwide in 2003 — 6.9 million in Europe, 13.6 million in Asia, 1.7 million in Australasia, 1 million in the Americas outside the US, 500,000 in Africa and 37.1 million in the United States. Amateur and professional golfers travel widely to play courses around the world, generating a sizeable golf-travel industry.

The birth of the Grand Slam

The term Grand Slam was first used for Bobby Jones’s feat in 1930, when he won the four most prestigious tournaments of the day: the British Open, the US Open, the US Amateur and the British Amateur. Jones’s friend and biographer, journalist O. B. Keeler of the Atlanta Journal, borrowed the expression from bridge, where it describes a hand in which one side takes every trick. These four tournaments then brought together the world’s best golfers, who were amateurs (professionals could not play in amateur events, whereas amateurs could enter the Opens).

Unlike many sports, golf is not run by a single federation but by two major bodies: Britain’s Royal and Ancient and the United States Golf Association (USGA). Their Opens are therefore regarded as the most important tournaments in the world, and each body holds sway over part of the globe: the Royal and Ancient over the Commonwealth (Canada, South Africa, India) and Europe, the USGA over South America and Asia.

In the early 1930s, professional associations — including the Professional Golfers’ Association of America, founded in 1916 — began organising their own tournaments for professionals, such as the PGA Championship. From the second half of the 20th century, the modern Grand Slam took shape: the two amateur championships were replaced by the PGA Championship and the Masters, founded at Augusta by Bobby Jones (the only invitation-only major). Since then, these four tournaments — three of them in the United States — have dominated men’s golf.