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| Golf is an
individual sport played in an outdoor course where the objective is
to drive a ball with a club into a series of holes. In a
competition, the player who is able to hole the ball in the fewest
strokes, is the winner. |
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Golf is a truly
ageless game. Arnold Palmer is one of the top players of the game at
the ripe old age of 72!
Golf had already been played in
India for 59 years before the first major course was opened in the
USA and Europe in 1888. By the end of the 19th century, India had a
dozen golf clubs!
India has the highest golf course in the
world - the Gyamchona Golf Course located in the Himalayan mountains
at a height of 16,295 feet!
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Everybody loves golf:
Donald Trump, Michael
Jordan, Kapil Dev, Kevin Costner, Lance Klusner, Cindy
Crawford, Michael Bolton, Bill Clinton are all golf fans!
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Golf developed
in England, where it was played as early as the 15th century. The
first written reference to the sport was made in 1457, when the
Parliament of King James II ruled that both "Fute-ball and Golfe be
utterly cryed downe" (Playing football and golf should be
discouraged) because playing these games stopped people from
practicing archery, a battle
sport. | |
| James IV the Scottish king who banned the game in 1491
calling it an 'unproffitable sportis' later became the first
recorded player of golf. The king's accounts include early in the
16th century payments for His Majesty's 'golf clubbis and ballis'.
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| The
oldest golf club is also an English club, 'The Company of Gentlemen
Golfers', now called the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. The
first amateur championship was held in 1885. |
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The
game grew popular all over the world with the standarisation of
equipment and the replacing of wooden and feather balls with cheaper
balls made of gutta-percha and later
rubber. | |
Balls
How the ball is hit and directed is the
essence of golf. So important is the ball in a game of golf that
improvements in the ball helped popularize the game. The first golf
balls were made of wood. In early 17th century, leather balls filled
with compressed feathers were used, but the process of making these
was so slow that hardly 4-5 balls could be made by one man in a day!
The Gutta-percha balls came next in 1848. These were made of
gutta-percha, the juice of various South American island
trees which becomes hard when dried. These were cheaper and helped
make the game popular among those who found wooden balls too
expensive. The beginning of the 20th century introduced a new ball
made of rubber. The rubber ball was softer and easier to hit than
the 'gutty', which helped spread the game among older men, women and
children who had found the earlier ball hard to play. While the
standard British weight of 1.62 ounces was accepted all over the
world, the Americans increased the diameter of the ball to 1.68
inches. | |
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| The first
organized series of regular international matches were held between Great
Britain and the United States. Today the major golf tournaments in the
world are the British Isles, the U.S. Open, the Professional Golfers'
Association (PGA), Masters and the World Cup. The Walker Cup (for
amateurs) and the Ryder Cup (for professionals) were traditionally
competed between the US and British golfers, though the latter now
features golfers from Europe as well. The women's amateur team match
(Curtis Cup) began in 1932. |
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Golf was brought
to India by British settlers and soon became popular all over the
country. India's first golf club the Royal Calcutta Golf Club,
established in 1829, was the first golf club outside Great Britain.
The Indian Golf Union emerged in 1955 as the controlling body for
the game.
The Union is now affiliated to the World Amateur
Golf Council. Golfing in India has come a long way, and a large
number of Indian players now compete on the international circuit.
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PRIZE MONEY
Gone are the days when the likes of Harry
Vardon could take home £50 (Rs 3350) and a medal for winning his
record sixth British Open in 1914. Today golf is one of the most
lucrative sport in the world. By the mid-1980s the total purse for
the U.S. professional tour was $25,000,000 (Rs 1125000000). The
likes of Tiger Woods are counted among the richest sportsmen in the
world. Jeev Milkha Singh, the only Indian Golf player to have made
it to the top 100 earnings list (1999) earned $206, 231 (Rs 9280395)
and had the 86th rank. | |
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| Golf is played on a specially constructed golf course. A player has
to try to hole the golf ball in a round of 18 holes. Standard (18-hole)
courses measure from 5,900 to 6,400 metres, though some couses have only
nine holes (these are played twice in a round). |
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The hole is 4 ¼
inches in diameter and at least four inches deep.
Golf balls
have a maximum weight of 45.93 grams and a minimum diameter of 1.68
inches. | |
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Golf Clubs
You
might have seen players chug along long bags with a number of golf
clubs on a course. Different kind of clubs are designed for the
various positions in which the ball may come to rest and for the
various distances to the hole.
No
more than 14 clubs may be carried during a round. There are
differences in length and suppleness of shaft, weight, size and
shape of head etc. Clubs are known both by number and by
name. |
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largely designates its length and the distance and height a club will
drive a ball (the lower the number, the greater the distance). The most
widely used clubs may be identified as follows:
Woods -- number 1
(driver), number 2 (brassie), number 3 (spoon), number 4 (baffy), and
number 5 (replaces number 3 or 4 iron). |
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| Irons--number 1 (driving iron), number 2 (midiron), number 3
(mid-mashie), number 4 (mashie iron), number 5 (mashie), number 6 (spade
mashie), number 7 (mashie-niblick), number 8 (pitching
niblick), |
| number 9 (niblick), number 10 (wedge), and putter (carries no
number). |
Play for every hole
starts at the teeing ground. The front of this ground is marked with a
line and the moving area is the rectangular space two club lengths behind
the line. The player strikes his ball usually after setting it up on a
small peg called a tee. The stroke from the teeing ground is called the
drive.
There is an ideal path to the hole called the fairway. This
path is bordered by weeds, bushes and the like called the rough; there are
also other obstacles called bunkers, sand traps, ponds and streams and
other hazards on the way which the player has to avoid. |
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Forms of
play
There are two kinds of games in golf : match play and
stroke (medal) play.
In match play the player and his
opponent are playing together and competing only against each other.
The game is played by holes and each hole is won by the player who
holes his ball in the fewer strokes. If both players score the same
number of strokes, the hole is halved. When a player has won a hole
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more
than his opponents, he is said to be 1 up. The match is won by
the player who is leading by a number of holes greater than
the number of holes remaining to be played, as, for example, 3
up and 2 to play.
In stroke play each competitor is
competing against every other player in the tournament. The
competitor who holes the stipulated round
or | rounds in the
fewest total strokes is the winner. Stroke play requires a greater
degree of consistency in a player, for one hole where he lapses into
a high figure can ruin his total and cost him victory.
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| Handicaps |
| A
handicap is that magic number which allows a new player to compete with a
professional! It's not a magic potion, but the number of extra strokes you
may get if you're competing against a better player. Naturally, the better
the player, the smaller his handicap, and the best players have handicaps
of zero or scratch . However, don't let the handicap system make you think
of applying for a prize money tournament - handicaps are not counted in
professional events! |
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| Par is
essentially a U.S. term that came into use in the early 1900s as a base
for computing handicaps. Every course has a par, which is defined as the
score an expert or zero handicap player might normally make playing on the
course. |
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| BOGEY |
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| Bogey is
essentially a British term that came into use in England in 1891 and
was derived from a mythical Colonel Bogey, who was described as
uniformly steady but never overbrilliant. Today, a bogey is the
score that a good golfer would be expected to make. |
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