Golf

Golf

Why Golf? If you compare golf to other sports, you may think that hitting a ball into a hole in the ground sounds fairly simple. Nothing could be further from the truth. To play well, golfers need patience, balance, focus, and lots of practice. Yet if golf is hard, why do millions of people love the sport? It's played in beautiful places with rolling green land. It gives people the chance to learn, practice, and improve. Most of all, golf offers hours of fun and relaxation.

Playing Golf Golfers use clubs to hit a small, hard ball into a hole using as few strokes, or swings, as possible. Sometimes the ball must travel a very long way to reach the hole. Sometimes it only needs to move a short distance. At other times, it must fly high in the air to get over long grass or other things. Golfers need to know how to make all these types of shots.

The sport is played on a golf course, which is a large area of land that is carefully mowed and trimmed to define the areas of the course. A golf course usually has nine or eighteen sections, or holes. Each section begins at the teeing ground, where golfers usually place their ball on a small peg called a tee. They hit the ball down the fairway-the area that leads to the small hole at the far end of the section. The area around the small hole is called the putting green, or simply the green. It almost always takes several strokes to get the ball there. However, lucky golfers sometimes get a hole in one.

Golfers need to deal with hazards, which are parts of the course that they try to avoid. Getting a ball out of a hazard may take extra strokes, which is bad for a golfer's score. One type of hazard is a sand-filled area called a bunker. Streams and ponds are other types of hazards. The rough-the area around each section, which usually has trees, bushes, and longer grass-can also present problems.

A golf game usually involves playing eighteen different sections, called holes. If a golf course has only nine holes, golfers often play the course twice. Each hole on a golf course has a number, called the par. If a hole has a par of four, golfers try to get the ball into the hole in four strokes or less. The number depends on the distance from the teeing ground to the hole. Most holes are three, four, or five par. Par for the course is the total of all the pars for the entire nine or eighteen holes. Golfers who play together in a small group compare their totals for the whole course. The player with the lowest score wins.