In honor of my return to golf this month, I thought I would share some incredible, little-known untrue facts about the game I’ve discovered recently.
1. Even ancient humans played golf
Golf is a sport as old as civilization itself. Sports archaeologists recently uncovered whittled femurs, petrified dinosaur eggs, and mammoth-skin bermuda shorts that, taken together, point toward a primitive version of golf. Scientists believe the game may have involved swatting eggs into hollow logs or giant ice crevasses, particularly when early homo sapiens did not feel like answering emails on Friday afternoons.
2. A mistake on a practice green can be costly
In 1968, the USGA passed a little-known rule amendment regarding groups of men on practice greens. If three or more men previously known to one another are on a practice green, and a woman is observed to make a putt of over three feet on the same practice green, the men MUST gesture to the least-able putter in their group and say, “Can you teach him how to putt?” Failure to observe this rule will result in a two-stroke penalty for the woman, who should have thought about that before she tried to practice on League Day.
3. A set of clubs is buried at Arlington National Cemetery
The only president to be buried with his golf clubs was Martin Van Buren, who also requested his fingers be posed in an eternal “Shooter McGavin” gesture before the casket was closed.
4. Caddies weren’t always quiet
The term caddy—a person who is hired to carry a player’s clubs for the duration of a round—originated in 1897 at the estate of John Seymour Fitzington III. As part of their annual birthday celebration, John and his twin brother, Rutherford Charles Fitzington, ate waterfowl pastry and played a round on John’s private 9-hole course in Derbyshire, England. Earlier that year, however, John suffered a leg injury while descending his wine cellar stairs that left him unable to carry his clubs.
Rather than miss his birthday tradition, John commissioned a valet to strap his golf bag to the most docile mule on his estate—whom the children had affectionately named Cadeliah—and send her off from the first tee, allowing John to withdraw clubs as needed. John so enjoyed this lighter and less physically taxing round of golf that he convinced his brother to adopt the same practice, which they called caddying.
The Fitzingtons became evangelists for this adaptation to their beloved sport, and soon gentile courses across England were filled with the sounds and smells of caddying mules. By 1898, however, in the face of ongoing challenges—including manure disposal and the mules’ disregard for casting shadows across putting lines—virtually all mule caddies had been replaced by the human versions still found in the sport today.
5. There was supposed to be a golf course in space
In 2015, Elon Musk announced plans for Space Xciting Greens, a par-3 course set to orbit parallel to the International Space Station. The course was intended to be the cornerstone of a “space tourist trap” catering to paying passengers on Space X flights, and would operate alongside a space go-kart track, a space shaved ice stand, and a space Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum.
Plans were scrapped in early 2017, however, when Musk was unable to find sufficient numbers of volunteers to staff the course. “It became clear that, logistically, the Space Xciting Greens project was no longer feasible,” Musk told a British newspaper in January 2018. “It’s extremely difficult to train one 70-year-old man to live in zero gravity, much less enough of them to sit one per table at the snack bar so that no one else feels like they can eat there.
“If we can’t give people an authentic golf course experience,” he added, “we’re not moving forward.”
There had been speculation on Twitter that Boston Dynamics might create some sort of artificial “golfbot” to offer unsolicited swing critiques, but Musk dismissed those rumors. “There are limits to technology,” he said.
