The ENTIRE History of Golf

Picture a strip of rough sandy grass on the Scottish coast in the 1450s, the North Sea wind howling, and a man in a wool cloak chasing a ball toward a hole in the ground. That simple act was about to become a crime. This is the story of how a game a king tried to outlaw grew into one of the richest sports on Earth, played today on about 38,000 courses, and once even on the Moon. We follow golf from the links of Scotland and the ban of 1457, through the first written rules in Edinburgh in 1744 and the standard 18-hole round settled at St Andrews in 1764. We see the ball change from the feather-stuffed featherie to the guttie and the rubber-wound Haskell, meet Old Tom and Young Tom Morris, and watch the first Open Championship in 1860 begin. From there the game crosses the ocean, builds its governing bodies, and ends up in a fight over billions of dollars and a new rule to rein in the ball. It answers one question: how did a banned pastime become a global empire of grass?