Even if you want to swing your clubs as a weekend hobby and have no desire to reach professional status, knowing the basics of golf is a must. To help you thrive on the green, you need to understand the scoring system. If you don’t know how to keep score, how will you improve your game? If you are new to golf and need to learn the lingo, there are words that won’t make sense at first. You could get an eagle, score a birdie, see an albatross, or land a bogey. What is a bogey in golf? This is what it means for your scorecard.
Scoring in golf
The scoring terminology for golf has a common theme — and it has to do with birds. Eagle, birdie, albatross, and bogey. It sounds like people are throwing out random feathery friends they see in the sky. To understand how scoring in golf goes, you have to know how par works first.
What par is in golf
It doesn’t matter how many holes the course you’re playing on has; each hole has a par number. Course designers and experienced players come together to determine what each hole’s par should be so it’s not a number they plucked from thin air.
Par is the number of swings it would take an experienced golfer to hit the ball from tee to cup. Think of it as the base number for each hole. So, if a hole is par 3, a decent golfer should make it in three swings. Most holes on a golf course are par 3, par 4, and par 5. Par 2 and par 6 exist, but you may never see them, so focus on the other ones.
What a bogey is in golf
You get a bogey if you hit the ball from the tee into the cup in one swing more than par for the hole. If the hole is par 3, you would score a bogey if you made it in four swings. Five swings on a par 4 means you landed a bogey.
Why it is called a bogey
Using fowl for golf slang has been the standard for over 120 years, starting with when the word “birdie” was first used in a game to describe a shot. If you like a theme, you stick with it, and golf loves using birds to keep score. Bogey entered the lineup not long after birdie.
Around 1890, an Edwardian song called “Hush! Hush! Hush! Here Comes the Bogey Man” was rising in popularity. During that time, the Secretary of the Great Yarmouth Club, Dr. Browne, and his friend Mr. Wellman were playing a game when Wellman called out to Browne that a player was a real Bogey Man. It stuck.
Bogey was initially used as the first scoring system and meant the ground score. Sound familiar? We now call that par. Around the middle of the 20th century, bogey would settle in its home as the score for one over par.
Golf is an old game with a rich history and all kinds of fun lore. It might take a few practice swings, but you’ll get the hang of golfing terms. How to score a bogey isn’t as complicated as the word makes it sound. Shoot one over par, and your scorecard will look better than most.
