Golf Compendium

"Shark" is the name of a golf side game in which golfers are wagering they can make par on a hole even after hitting their golf ball into water. Of course, avoiding water is something golfers very much want to do. But if you do find water on a shot, Shark rewards a great recovery.

There is a word in golf that most golfers are scared of. That most consider very bad luck to use. That most of us try to avoid uttering. What is that word? The s-word. And what is "the s-word"? It's sh— shhhhhhh! don't say that word!

Fred Haas wasn't just the golfer who ended Byron Nelson's 11-tournament win streak in 1945. He won that tournament while still an amateur. Haas went on to a productive PGA Tour career. He won four more tournaments in the 1940s and 1950s, and also had success in senior golf before the Champions Tour existed. Haas was also the first golfer to play in both the Walker Cup and Ryder Cup.

The Charlotte Open was a professional golf tournament played in North Carolina for a few years in the 1940s. Part of the PGA Tour circuit of the time, it was born in the war years and its history includes a couple significant events.

Tiger Woods has won a lot of pro golf tournaments. Most of those wins happened on the world's biggest tour, the PGA Tour. But Woods also ranks highly in career European Tour victories, and recorded wins on several other world golf tours, too.

The children's game tic-tac-toe has been around for a very long time. And almost everyone knows how to play it: Draw a grid to create nine squares; two players alternate placing X's and O's in those squares trying to get three across, three up-and-down, or three diagonally. In the golf version of tic-tac-toe, two golfers are putting or chipping to those nine squares, trying to place balls into three boxes across, up-and-down or diagonally.

Perhaps our title should have been "what it meant " to bone a shot, because "bone" is an archaic bit of golf lingo. The term is rarely used in golf today. But it was once (and, you never know, could be again) a synonym for a bladed or thinned shot.

Sherri Turner, born October 4, 1956, in Greenville, South Carolina, played on the LPGA Tour from the early 1980s into the 2000s. Her long career produced only three victories. But Turner did have one big year in which she not only won a major championship, but some Player of the Year awards, too.

In the betting game known as Savies, the goal is saving par after you've missed the green. Do that and you'll earn points. Do it enough, and you could earn some of your opponents' money.