So, I’m out at Riviera, post Nissan, with our resident Hall-of-Famer, Amy Alcott, and the conversation wends it’s merry way around to the subject of why golf courses have 18 holes.  Sure sounds like an arbitrary number, like why is the pitcher’s mound 60 feet 6 inches from home plate or the hoop set at 10 feet … we can only guess that the balcony in the Springfield Mass gym where Dr. Naismith hung the peach basket when he invented basketball was 10 feet off the ground. 

Well, the story Amy heard was that a bottle of whiskey contains 18 shots and that the liquid libation’s magic number was the determining factor. Romantic to say the least, but truth is a 1 liter bottle of the olde dew contains 23 snorts, and lord knows we don’t need 23 hole courses or you’d be out there overnight at the current pace of play.

Fact is, it was a real estate issue – there was only so much land available between the town of St. Andrews and the sea and so, when they were done measuring that stretch that linked (from whence the term links comes) the land to the sea, they had just enough room for 18 holes.  Pity – if they had only come up 500 yards short, think of what woulda happened … golf courses would have 17 holes and Leftie would have another major and the Nissan in his bag. So, you, Angus McTavish, and that lost clan of hearty Scots who laid out the Old Course, you’ve earned an historic unplayable lie, take a penalty stroke -- and a wee dram -- and play on.