If I told you that the rules of golf are being changed to require every hole on every course in the world to be of the same length; that every bunker must have exactly the same dimension; that fairway widths must be uniform on every hole; and that putting surfaces be of the exact same shape worldwide, you would think either that I had gone mad or you’d be checking the date at the top of this article to see if it was published on April 1st.
Yet there is one dimension on a golf course – and one dimension only – that we accept unquestionably as having to be the same on every course everywhere in every circumstance. That is the size of the hole cup.
Why?
One of the beauties of golf is that it takes so many different forms in so many contrasting landscapes, courses of vastly different styles and, yes, dimensions. You can get a WHS index from playing a nine-hole course of 750 yards or from playing an 18-holer that stretches to 8,000 yards.
Everything can be different from one hole to another, and from course to another, except the actual dimension of the hole cut into the putting surface.
Golf at is was
It used not to be this way. Courses used to be able to determine their own hole diameters, just as they were able to decide where to cut the holes in the green, where to place the tee markers, where to position the bunkers, how to maintain various parts of the course, and all the rest of it.
They can still do all the rest of these things.
But in 1891, The R&A decreed that the size of a hole cup was to be 4.25 inches, a size chosen after careful consideration and much mathematical modelling. Well no actually. It was because that was the diameter of an old bit of drainpipe that happened to be lying around at Musselburgh.
At some courses this new hole size was a vast reduction on what they had been used to playing to. Hole cup sizes of up to 7 inches in diameter had been used on some famous and highly regarded courses. Nor was the hole size necessarily the same on all 18 holes of these courses.
Only once in several decades of golfing can I remember playing a hole where the cup was anything other than 4.25 inches in diameter.
It was when a temporary green was in operation – a semi-random section of fairway with divots in it, where the ball did not run easily across…
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