The 18-Hole Round

A persistent story claims golf has 18 holes because that's how many measures of Scotch whisky fit in a bottle — the idea being a golfer finished a dram per hole and was "done" after 18. This is a myth with no documentary basis whatsoever; the real explanation is a specific, dated administrative decision at St Andrews with nothing to do with drink.

This card applies the same three-tier framework used throughout this collection: documented claims rest on primary records, chiefly the Society of St Andrews Golfers' own minute books; traditional claims describe how a practice spread or was adopted, which is well attested in general but not always precisely dated at every club; and legend/myth claims are popular explanations that are demonstrably false or unsupported, most notably the whisky-bottle story. The 1764 decision itself is unusually well documented for golf history — it survives as a dated administrative record, not an oral tradition — which is precisely why the myths that have grown up around the number "18" deserve to be corrected rather than repeated.

The Old Course before 1764: a 22-hole round on a narrow strip of land

To understand why 18 holes is not an obvious or inevitable number, it helps to picture the Old Course as it existed before the change. St Andrews' linksland sits on a narrow tongue of ground between the sea and the Eden estuary, which meant the course could not simply spread outward to accommodate more or wider holes the way a modern course might. Instead, golfers played a sequence of holes running away from the town, then turned and played largely the same holes back toward the clubhouse — a layout historians describe as "out and home" along essentially the same strip of ground, with golfers travelling in opposite directions sharing much of the same turf and the same large, shared double greens (a feature the Old Course still retains today, with several huge greens serving two holes at once, one on the way out and one on the way back).

Before 1764, this round comprised 22 holes in total: 11 holes on the way out, and the same 11 played again coming back. This was not an unusual or especially long round by the standards of early Scottish golf, where hole counts varied considerably between courses depending on available land, informal custom, and the preferences of the golfing societies that used each course — there was no national standard at the time, because there was no national governing body yet in the modern sense.

The 1764 decision: a specific, dated administrative act

The change to 18 holes did not arise from any debate about an ideal or symbolic number. It is recorded in the minute book of the Society of St Andrews Golfers (the forerunner of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, renamed under royal patronage in 1834) as a practical adjustment. On 4 October 1764, the Society resolved that the course's first four holes were too short to be worth playing as separate holes, and combined them into two. Because the same holes served both the outward and the return journey, this single change to the first four holes reduced the total round from 22 holes to 18 — the number that has endured ever since. William St Clair of Roslin, a prominent and long-serving figure in the Society at the time, is commonly associated with the decision, though the minute itself records the Society's collective resolution rather than a single individual's personal ruling.

It is worth being precise here: this was a local, practical course-management decision, not an attempt to set a global standard. Nobody in 1764 intended to fix the number of holes for golf courses worldwide forever; they were simply addressing a specific problem with four holes on one specific course.

From a local fix to a global convention: why 18 holes spread

If the 1764 change was only ever meant to solve a local problem, the obvious question is how it became the worldwide standard it is today. The honest answer is gradual, prestige-driven convergence rather than any formal rule, decree, or vote establishing "18" as mandatory. Through the 18th and into the 19th century, Scottish and then English golf clubs continued to vary considerably in hole count — courses with 5, 9, 12 and other totals coexisted without controversy, since golf was still a loosely organised, locally governed pastime rather than a codified international sport with a single rulebook on course design.

What changed this was St Andrews' accumulating institutional authority. As the Society of St Andrews Golfers became the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews (gaining royal patronage under William IV in 1834) and increasingly took on a leading role in setting and interpreting the Rules of Golf more broadly (a separate story covered in its own card in this collection), the Old Course's particular features — including its 18-hole round — carried outsized symbolic weight. New clubs being founded through the 19th century, especially as golf expanded into England and then overseas via Scottish emigrants, soldiers and merchants, increasingly treated 18 holes as the default "complete" course when land and budget allowed it, simply because St Andrews was the most prestigious and most imitated course in the game. By the time golf had spread to the United States and the British Empire in the later 19th century, 18 holes had become the accepted norm for a full round almost everywhere resources permitted it, even though — and this deserves emphasis — no single rule-making body ever formally legislated the number for all courses; smaller or resource-constrained clubs continued (and continue today) to build 9-hole courses as a recognised, legitimate shorter alternative, not a lesser or incomplete format.

Correcting the myths: why "18" is not symbolic or ceremonial

Precisely because the real explanation is a dry administrative record rather than a dramatic founding myth, folklore has filled the gap. The most widespread invented explanation is the claim that 18 holes corresponds to 18 "shots" or measures of Scotch whisky in a standard bottle, the idea being that a golfer's round and their bottle would run out together. This story has no documentary support of any kind, appears nowhere in the Society's records or in any credible 18th- or 19th-century golf writing, and is best understood as a much later invented folk explanation that happens to combine two things popularly associated with Scotland. It should never be presented as a credible account of why golf has 18 holes; the genuine explanation — the 1764 consolidation of four short holes on one specific, real course — is both better documented and, properly told, a more interesting story than the invented one.

Present-day status: convention, not codified law

Today, 18 holes is the universal expectation for a "full" golf course and a "full" round in professional and most serious amateur competition, and major championships (including the Open Championship, Masters, US Open and PGA Championship) are contested over multiples of 18 holes. However, it is worth noting precisely what kind of standard this is: it is an overwhelmingly strong convention reinforced by professional tour formats, course design norms, and golfer expectations worldwide, rather than a single clause in the official Rules of Golf mandating that every course must have exactly 18 holes. Nine-hole courses remain common, legitimate, and widely played, particularly where land or cost is constrained, and some historic courses have deviated from 18 for their own local reasons.

established Scotland itself shows how loose the convention was during the great expansion of the game. John Lowerson, in "Golf and the making of myths" in Scottish Sport in the Making of the Nation (1994), notes that Scotland has a higher proportion of nine-hole courses than England. Many of the clubs founded in the boom of the 1890s and 1900s were small town or resort clubs; the Ranfurly Castle club at Bridge of Weir, for example, began in the 1880s as a nine-hole course promoted by a local doctor. Edinburgh's first municipal provision on the Braid Hills (1890) and Glasgow's two public courses of the 1890s, which had 27 holes between them, show the same practical approach. Eighteen holes was the prestige standard, not a requirement. The 18-hole round's dominance is best described as the single most successful piece of golf-course standardisation in the sport's history — one that began as a narrow, practical fix to four short holes at St Andrews in 1764 and, through nearly two centuries of imitation rather than legislation, became arguably the most recognisable numerical convention in all of sport.

• The Old Course's distinctive huge double greens — several greens today serve two different holes, one on the outward nine and one on the inward nine — are a direct physical legacy of the old "out and home" 22-hole layout.
• The 1764 change affected only the first four holes, yet because those same holes were shared by the outward and return routes, it altered the entire round's total by four holes at once.
• Golf courses with hole counts other than 18 — 9, 12, even unusual numbers — were common and unremarkable throughout the 18th and much of the 19th century; "18" only became an unquestioned expectation gradually.
• There is no documentary evidence whatsoever for the popular "18 holes = 18 shots in a whisky bottle" story; it does not appear in any 18th- or 19th-century golf source.
• St Andrews golfers in the 18th century played the same strip of turf out and back, meeting players coming the other way on shared fairways and greens, which is part of why combining short, awkward holes made practical sense.
• Scotland still has an unusually high share of nine-hole courses. The sports historian John Lowerson noted in 1994 that this makes Scottish golf less land-hungry than England's, despite the country's 18-hole legacy.
• The 250th anniversary of the 1764 decision was formally marked at St Andrews in 2014, underlining how precisely the date is documented and commemorated.
• No single global rule or law has ever formally mandated 18 holes for every golf course; it is an extraordinarily strong convention, not a universal legal requirement.
• William St Clair of Roslin, associated with the 1764 decision, was also a noted archer and a prominent figure in several Edinburgh and St Andrews golfing and sporting societies of the period.

• The "18 holes = 18 whisky measures" story must never be stated as fact. It is unsupported folklore with no documentary basis and should always be labelled a myth.
• 18 holes should not be presented as having been instantly or universally adopted after 1764. Other hole counts persisted at many clubs for decades afterward; adoption was gradual and informal, driven by imitation of St Andrews rather than any binding rule.
• 18 holes is not a strict, universally enforced legal requirement for a golf course. It is an overwhelmingly dominant convention; 9-hole and other formats remain legitimate.
• The 1764 decision should not be conflated with the 1744 codification of golf's rules at Leith — these are separate events, two decades apart, involving different bodies and different subject matter.
• Avoid attributing the 1764 decision to a single person's personal preference. The Society's minute records a collective resolution; William St Clair of Roslin's precise individual role beyond his known association with the Society at the time is not fully documented.