Golf Compendium

What does it take to make the field at The Masters Tournament? It takes meeting the qualifying criteria, which triggers Augusta National Golf Club to send an invitation to play.

George Duncan was a Scottish golfer who won tournaments from the 1900-aughts into the late 1920s. Those wins included the British Open as well as the French, Belgian and Irish opens. He was deeply involved in the earliest years of the Ryder Cup (including the development of the competition) and was playing captain in Great Britain's first Ryder Cup win. Duncan was famous for being a very fast player.

"Money Ball" is the name of a golf tournament format that starts with teams of four golfers. On each team, one player per hole is the designated "money ball" player, and that player's score will be counted as half the team's score on every hole. The other three players on the team contribute the other half of the team score. But there is often a very big catch in Money Ball: If the golfer who is playing the "money ball" loses it, the team is eliminated from tournament contention.

Which golfers have won the most titles in the four major championships of men's professional golf? The list below includes all golfers with more than one major victory.

In this article we take a look at the golfers on the LPGA Tour who are most successful at recording Top 10 finishes. But there are two different ways to look at that stat.

Dave Douglas was a professional golfer who played on the PGA Tour in the 1940s and 1950s. He won eight tour events, and also played on Team USA in one Ryder Cup.

The Kia Classic, also called the JTBC Classic, was a golf tournament on the LPGA Tour. It was played from the 2010s into the 2020s in Southern California.

The golf game named Low Putts is exactly as its name suggests: The golfer with the lowest number of putts needed over the full round is the winner. If you required 31 putts to play 18 holes, while your playing partners took 32, 33 and 34 putts, respectively, you win the Low Putts bet.

Have you heard the golf club terms "blended set" or "blended irons"? What about "combo set" or "combo irons"? They mean essentially the same thing, and those terms are referring to a way of building an iron set that involves mixing-and-matching clubs taken from several different sets.

The Philadelphia Open Championship was a golf tournament on the PGA Tour for much of a two-decade period in the early part of the 20th century. The tournament is still played today and is an important regional event, but has not been considered a PGA Tour tournament since 1937.

You just completed the third hole of the golf course and it took you four strokes to do so. You write down a "4" on the scorecard. But what is the golf scoring term that applies to that score of 4? Well, it could be a birdie, a par, a bogey — maybe even an eagle.

Leonard Dodson was a golf pro and legendary golf gambler who also happened to be good enough to win several times on the PGA Tour in the 1930s and 1940s. And three of his tournament wins came in playoff victories over future Hall of Famers.

"Hog" is the name of a golf betting game in which one golfer in a group of four, on each hole, has the option to play against the other three, or to partner up with one of the other three. Is it very similar to other games known as Wolf and Defender , although Hog is typically a points-based game rather than having money directly riding on the outcome of each hole. (Sometimes the Hog and Wolf names are used interchangeably, however.)

Carlos showed up at his golf club one day to discover that the club had begun a program using seniors as caddies. One day a week, the club replaced all its regular caddies with senior citizens.

Which golfers have won the most senior majors ? In senior (50-and-over) golf, there are five major championships recognized by the Champions Tour (officially named PGA Tour Champions), which is the pre-eminent tour for professional, 50-and-over golfers. The list below includes every golfer with at least two victories in those senior majors.

Three Blind Mice is the name of a golf game that comes in two versions. Both versions involving tossing out three scores at the end of the round, and both versions can be played either as a tournament format, or as a betting game within one group of golfers.

Is there a standard number of par-4 holes used on golf courses? No — but a very high percentage of all full-length, 18-hole golf courses contain either 10, 11 or 12 par-4 holes.

In terms of tournament wins, Leo Diegel is one of the Top 20 golfers in PGA Tour history. He won two major championships in the 1920s. And he was regarded in his own time as one of the greatest iron players ever. Today, he is little-remembered. But his name still comes up when a current golfer adopts a strange putting method. Because Diegel's greatest fame came from "Diegeling," the eponymous name given to his putting stance, which one observer compared to "a car with both doors open."

Which golfers have won the most major championships in women's golf ? Annika Sorenstam, Kathy Whitworth and Nancy Lopez are all on the list below, but none of them is No. 1.

The Train is the name of a golf game in which golfers earn points for scores that are par or better. But they lose all their points if they make too many bogeys — or any double bogey.

They called him Fat Jack. Ohio Fats. Another nickname for Jack Nicklaus when he first hit the pro ranks was "Baby Beef." But just how much did Jack Nicklaus weigh when his fellow pros — and newspaper headline writers — were calling him those names?

T&F (or "T and F") is the name of a golf format that counts nine holes out of your 18-hole round to determine winners. Which nine holes count? The ones that begin with a "T" and an "F."

The Australian Ladies Masters golf tournament was played under various names for nearly 30 years. For some of those years it was an LPGA Tour tournament, and others it was part of the Ladies European Tour schedule. Karrie Webb won it eight times.