Golf Compendium

No, an amateur golfer has never won The Masters Tournament. A few have come close, including three who finished runner-up. But it has been a very long time since any amateur even finished in the Top 5 at this major championship.

The golf wager known as "Duck" (sometimes "Duckies") is one that is lost by the last golfer to hold the duck. And what does "holding the duck" mean? It means you hit into water.

Embed from Getty Images Billy Joe Patton was a lifelong amateur golfer who never came close to winning either of the two biggest amateur tournaments. But he did come close to winning a professional major, The Masters, and had multiple Top 10 finishes in both The Masters and U.S. Open. Patton was a big-bombing country boy who captured the imagination of golf fans in the 1950s and 1960s.

Do you know what the golf slang terms "cat box" and "kitty litter" refer to? They are both alternate names for sand bunkers (sand traps) on golf courses.

Do the USGA and R&A, the two governing bodies that set the rules of golf, impose a minimum and maximum size for golf balls? Yes and no. There is a minimum size, but there is no maximum size.

The Florida Lady Citrus (known as the Freedom/Orlando Classic in its final year) was a golf tournament on the LPGA Tour played mostly during the 1980s. Although played only six times, it produced some memorable results.

Good golf etiquette is, along with your opponent, the enemy in the game known as Caddy Shack. That's because in Caddy Shack, you are allowed to violate every rule of golf etiquette, you are allowed to do pretty much anything, to distract your opponent and throw them off their game. It's the whole point of Caddy Shack.

Golf is full of side games and competition formats, hundreds of possibilities for a group of buddies or a field of tournament players. What you'll find here are explanations of hundreds of those games.

"Misery" the name of a golf game in which the points "earned" are actually penalties: Golfers are assessed points each time they make a mistake (such as 3-putting or hitting into water). So the object of Misery, just like the object of regular stroke play, is to have the lowest score at the end.