Golf

Golf is a club and ball sport in which players attempt to sink a ball into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible, scoring by stroke play (fewest total strokes) or match play (holes won). The modern game's codified origin is the 1744 rules of the Company of Gentlemen Golfers (later the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers) at Leith, Scotland, followed by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, founded 1754, whose 1764 decision to play its links in eighteen holes rather than twenty-two fixed the number every course now follows. The game's deeper ancestry is unresolved: some historians trace family resemblance to the Roman game paganica, the Chinese game chuiwan, or the Dutch game kolven, but no continuous line of descent from any of these to fifteenth-century Scottish golf is established, so the sport's antiquity beyond its Scottish codification remains a matter of resemblance rather than documented lineage.