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Golf Fun Facts

3 October 2026 · 5 min read

Golf is full of odd stories. These golf fun facts cover the ball, the course, the words golfers use and the records, and they're all true. Use them to win an argument at the clubhouse, fill a quiz round, or just enjoy how strange an old game can be.

Fun facts about the ball

• Early golf balls, called featheries, were leather pouches stuffed with wet feathers. A skilled maker could finish only a few a day, so they were expensive.
• From 1848 golfers switched to the gutty, made from gutta-percha tree sap. Players noticed that scuffed gutties flew better than smooth new ones.
• That discovery led, in time, to dimples. Most modern balls have somewhere between about 300 and 500 of them.
• The rules set a maximum weight and a minimum size for a golf ball, but no maximum size.

For the full story, read the history of the golf ball.

Fun facts about the course

• Before wooden pegs became common, golfers teed up on a little pile of damp sand, which is why old tees often had a box of sand beside them.
• The Old Course at St Andrews is usually closed to golf on Sundays, when it becomes a public park and people can walk across it.
• The word links comes from an Old English word for rising ground or a ridge, describing the sandy land between the beach and farmland where early golf was played.
• The Old Course once had 22 holes. It was reduced to 18 in 1764, and 18 slowly became the standard round.
• The Masters course, Augusta National, was built on the site of a former plant nursery, which is why each hole is named after a tree or shrub.

Fun facts about golf words

• Caddie is usually traced to the French word cadet, meaning a younger son.
• Bogey was first the name of an imaginary opponent, the "Bogey Man", in 1890s Britain. It only later came to mean one over par. See the history of par, bogey and birdie.
• Birdie comes from American slang around 1900, when anything excellent was called "a bird".
• Three under par is an albatross in Britain and a double eagle in the US. Four under is a condor.
• Old clubs had names instead of numbers: the mashie, niblick, spoon and cleek among them.

Fun facts about records and people

• Young Tom and Old Tom Morris were father and son, and they hold the youngest and oldest Open records between them.
• The Masters champion can take the green jacket home for a year. After that it stays at the club.
• The first US Open, in 1895 at Newport, Rhode Island, was won by Horace Rawlins.
• The group that became the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews was founded in 1754.

Fun facts from beyond the fairway

• In 1457 the Scottish parliament under James II banned golf, because it was keeping men away from archery practice.
• Steel shafts were slow to be accepted. The USGA allowed them in 1924, but the R&A didn't follow until 1929.
• In 1971, astronaut Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the Moon during Apollo 14.
• In 2006, cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin hit a golf ball from the International Space Station during a spacewalk, as part of a sponsored stunt.
• Golf has been an Olympic sport only on and off: it was played in 1900 and 1904, then returned in 2016.

How to use these facts

• Quiz night: turn any fact into a question. For a ready-made quiz, use our golf trivia questions.
• Party games: "true or false" works well with mixed ages.
• Kids: facts about space, sand tees and feathery balls are great for getting children interested.

Try it in Mashy

Here's one more fact: golf fits in a coffee break. Mashy is a free pixel-art golf game in your browser, with five 9-hole courses, from parkland ponds to clifftop holes over a chasm. Tee off as a guest on your phone or desktop, no download needed.