Golf
Why a golf course has 18 holes
A round of golf is 18 holes because the members of one club in St Andrews, Scotland, decided in October 1764 that their course had too many short holes. They cut it from 22 holes to 18. Other clubs copied St Andrews, slowly, over about a century.
Before 1764 there was no standard
Early Scottish courses had however many holes the ground allowed. The Gentlemen Golfers of Leith played over five holes. Prestwick, which hosted the first Open Championship in 1860, had twelve, and the Open was played as three rounds of it. A round had no fixed number of holes.
The Old Course at St Andrews ran out along a narrow strip of land and back again. Golfers played eleven holes out and the same eleven greens coming home, so a round was 22 holes.
The 1764 vote
On 4 October 1764 the Society of St Andrews Golfers, the club that became the Royal and Ancient, agreed that the first few holes were too short. They combined them, which removed two holes in each direction and left 18. Accounts differ on exactly which holes were merged, but they agree on the date, the 22-to-18 change and the reason.
Scottish golf historians call the number fairly arbitrary. It is what was left after the short holes were merged.
How 18 became the standard
St Andrews was the club other clubs looked to, and once it played 18 holes, a "round" there meant 18. When the Royal and Ancient wrote its rules in the 1850s, it defined a match as one round of the links, 18 holes, unless the players agreed otherwise. New courses built through the late 1800s followed that model, and by the early 1900s 18 holes had become the norm.
The layout of the Old Course kept changing after 1764. Shared greens stayed, and it was only in the 1860s that Old Tom Morris built a separate green for the first hole, giving the course the shape golfers play today.
Kimball golf fact
Kimball Golf Club in Minnesota played as a nine-hole course for 29 years, from 1968 until its second nine opened in 1997. Its architect, Joel Goldstrand, later became known for "reversible" nine-hole layouts that can be played in either direction. Read the Kimball story.
The whisky story
You will hear that 18 holes comes from a bottle of whisky holding 18 shots, one per hole. No record from the time connects the number to whisky; the 1764 decision was about short holes.
Nine-hole courses
A nine-hole course is played twice for a full round, often from different tees the second time. The handicap system accepts nine-hole scores too.