What a 'Three Jack' Is in Golf

A "three jack" or "three-jack" is something every golfer hopes to avoid on every hole they play: "Three-jack" refers to needing three attempts to sink your ball when putting. Miss your first putt, miss your second putt, make your third putt.

Yes, three jack is just a snappier slang expression for the more standard term of "three putt" or "3-putt." Too many three-jacks can ruin your round, and reducing your number of three jacks is a great way to lower your average score. Avoiding them — once on the putting surface, getting your ball into the hole in two putts or fewer — is considered so important that "3-Putt Avoidance" is an official statistical category on PGATour.com.

A sportswriter covering the 2005 PGA Championship for a New Jersey newspaper wrote that on one hole, Tiger Woods "blasted an eagle putt on 18 well past the hole and ended up with a three-jack par."

That usage provides a hint to what might be the origin of this particular bit of golf lingo in the way that "jack" can be used to mean something enlarged or overdone, or something pounded or hammered. Woods jacked his first putt — hit it too hard — past the hole. He missed the comebacker (second putt), then made his third. A 3-putt, a three-jack.

"Three jack" is also commonly spoken (or written) as "three jacked" or "three jacking," as in these usages:

  • In a newspaper article about an Oregon high school golf tournament, one of the golfers is quoted saying, "I three-jacked the first hole and I'm saying, 'Come on, Jacob, you three-jacked it again.' Then I crushed a tee shot on the second hole and everything was fine."
  • An North Dakota newspaper article about a club championship includes this example: "I think I hit every green. My putting was a lot better, I wasn't three-jacking very much."
Not surprisingly, the even-more-tragic 4-putt is sometimes called a "four jack."

More definitions:

Sources:
Adamek, Steve. "Fight to the Finish," Hackensack (N.J.) Record, August 14, 2005.
Kaspriske, Ron. Golf Digest's Complete Book of Golf Betting Games (affiliate link), 2007, Doubleday.
Maves, Norm Jr. "Raza, South settle for fourth," Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, May 18, 2011.
Wanek, Robert Jr. "Neitzke claims club cup," Wahpeton (N.D.) Daily News, August 24, 2021.

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