What is a Golf Handicap ?

The earliest record of golf handicapping is assumed to date from the late 17th century, in a diary maintained by Thomas Kincaid, a student in Edinburgh, Scotland, however the term handicap did not become popular in golf until the late nineteenth century. Prior to the start of play, competing golfers agreed on the number of strokes to be provided and the holes on which they would be used. According to Henry Brougham Farnie’s The Golfer’s Manual, agreed-upon terminology included “third-one” (one stroke every three holes), “half-one” (one stroke every two holes), “one more” (a stroke per hole), and “two more” (two strokes per hole).

During the late nineteenth century, the difference between a golfer’s best three scores for the year and par became the most regularly utilised handicapping technique in England and Scotland. As the sport evolved, so did dissatisfaction with the fairness of handicapping, with less skilled players especially upset because they were considerably less likely to play to the quality of their three-score average. Another difficulty was that the approach did not take into account the various challenges of different courses, therefore the handicap was not very portable.

In an attempt to address issues with a very basic handicap system, as well as several variations of that system and other systems in use, authorities in Great Britain and Ireland sought to standardise. The Ladies Golf Union (LGU) established one of the earliest standardised and egalitarian handicap systems in the 1890s. This was mostly accomplished through the use of union-assigned course ratings rather than club-generated ratings. It was not until the formation of the British Golf Unions Joint Advisory Committee in 1924 that the men’s game fully coordinated to create an equitable handicap system, including a uniform course rating, throughout Great Britain and Ireland; the Standard Scratch Score and Handicapping Scheme was introduced in 1926.

In the United States, the sport was governed by a single authority, the USGA, making the transition to a single standard handicapping scheme easier. The British three-score average method served as the foundation for the first national handicap system, which was implemented in 1911. The most significant advancement was a “par rating” method that calculated the average good score of a scratch player on each course, making the handicap more portable. It also said that a player’s handicap was meant to reflect their potential rather than their average performance. The USGA first permitted clubs to set its own par rates, but shortly changed their minds and began assigning values. The USGA Handicap System has evolved throughout time, with an increase in the number of scores utilised for handicap computations, the implementation of Equitable Stroke Control[11], and enhancements to the course rating system. However, the most major development was the introduction of the slope rating system, which allows handicaps to account for changes in difficulty between scratch and bogey golfers. USGA Course and Slope Ratings are currently the foundation of many alternative handicap systems.

As the sport expanded globally, associations around the world developed or changed their own handicap regulations. By the early twenty-first century, there were six major recognised handicapping systems in use around the world: The USGA Handicap System, the EGA Handicap System, the CONGU Unified Handicap System, the Golf Australia Handicap System, the South African Handicap System, and the Argentinian Handicap System. While these systems have some similarities, including as the usage of a common course rating system, they are not easily portable due to variances that make translating handicaps across systems problematic. To address these issues, the USGA and The R&A collaborated with the different existing handicapping agencies to create a new World Handicap System, which was implemented globally in 2020.