Golf

Golf

Summary: All you need to know about golf

Golf is among the world's most known and celebrated sport. Yet, golf surprisingly has a fewer number of participants than it deserve when compared to its world renown. Popular culture has it that golf is an elitist's sport; a sport that requires weighty cost to enjoy.

True to the existing fact, golf did start as an elitist sport way back to the past in the medieval courts of Scotland and England. Golf was a sport these royals and the nobles play. The early golf variation differs slightly from the form played today and the only difference was the set of rules. As technology allowed more and more improvement to ball flight distance, it made outdated rules inappropriate and needs to be modified constantly.

In a nutshell, golf is still a game where individuals or group of individuals hit the Golf Ball using a variety of Golf Club. This sport is played on a tract of land called the Golf Course and can be noted for its series of holes. Depending on the challenge of the course, a golf course can have 9 to 18 holes. The 19th hole is the slang for the golf course's club house where all players lounge and socialize.

When you say a "Tee", it refers to the small peg used to prop the golf ball for a "Drive", which means a longest manageable carry towards the green. Golf is won by the least number of strokes to land a hole; that taken into account, long drives, as well as controlling stroke, power, direction and spin are very necessary in winning a game.

Holes are classified according to "Par", or the number of strokes set to win a hole, including passing all the course difficulties called as "Hazards". These can take form as sand bunkers (like Pine Valley's 13th green) or natural formations such as ponds (like TPC Sawgrass' 17th hole) or even ruins (like Barefoot's 6th green).

The rules of the game aren't that complicated, in fact just reading and watching it isn't intimidating at all. But still, fewer participants are engaging in its sport in relative to its fame. We go back to culture. In the past, lords and nobles engage in this sport. Naturally, aristocrat personalities have vast estates where they usually play. Commoners have only the pastures and meadows where landscape is often untended.

In the modern era, golf course speaks as much aesthetic in its landscape as well as challenge it poses. And maintaining such huge tracts of land can be very expensive. So owners of these courses just can lower the price just for everybody. Now come in the modern aristocrats in the shoes of the entrepreneurs and wealthy. They have the money to purchase the entire golf equipment that existed. They dress to kill. From there it isn't hard to speculate how the golf culture was born.