Golf Scores: Keepers or Trackers?

For people who are new to golf or for golf player beginners, golf scores look like an insolvable puzzle. Not that tracking them would be difficult, as this is what scorecards and score trackers are for, but the scores are weird in themselves. In so much of life, we look to have positive numbers. Minus ten degrees is really cold, while plus sixty is nice and mild. On your bank statement, you never want to see a minus and if you do, the number next to it had better be pretty small. We even assign the words “positive” and “negative” where numbers are concerned, and nothing can be more prejudicial than that, right?

So to have a sport where you actively set out to record as low a score as possible will always be confusing for some. It makes perfect sense to the golfer and the golf enthusiast, though. Indeed, it helps to think of golf as a race of sorts – a race between men in ill-designed knitwear and slacks rather than lycra, but a race nonetheless. When you’re watching athletics, you know it’s been a good race if the numbers next to the winner’s name are low. Although if, as in golf, those numbers are in the negative then maybe it’s time for drugs tests all around.

The thing to keep in mind with golf is that you have a set number of shots which is judged as a fair limit in which to get around the course, called a par. On an eighteen-hole course this will almost always be between seventy and seventy two. The ideal is to get a score that is less than this – to get around the course in, for example, sixty eight shots. If you hit 68 on a course with a par of 72, then you have recorded a score of four under par, which is recorded on your score card as –4. In a professional tournament, there may be as many – indeed there usually will be as many – as four rounds. So for a competition around a par 72 course, the competition par will be 288, and the winner will always be the person with the lowest score.

There are persons who just love to play it for kicking the ball and having fun with their friends. For them, golf scores matter less.