Origin of the "Bogey"

[Clambake]

I re-read “The Greatest Game Ever Played” by Mark Frost on the plane the other day (a great book), and one of the tidbits which I found interesting was the history of the term “bogey” in golf.    Here’s a condensed version from Frost's book:

In 1890, England’s Coventry Club hosted a tournament where each player played a match against an imaginary opponent who posted what was believed to be an error free round, called “scratch”.    A popular music hall song that year had the repeated line “Hush! Hush! Hush! Here comes the bogey man!”.     The club secretary began jokingly refer to the imaginary opponent as the “bogey man”.   This quickly caught on with other clubs in the area, and the imaginary opponent's score became known as the bogey score.

In those early days, a bogey score was actually a standard of excellence; it was a score that a player with fine skill would achieve without making a mistake.     But golf was just starting to undergo a revolution in equipment, player skill, and course maintenance, and the scores quickly began to fall.    As an example, in 1913 at the Country Club at Brookline (site of the US Open which is at the focus of the book), the scorecard still listed the bogey figures for the hole with a total of 80, but that same hypothetical good player was now expected to shoot a score of 72-74 instead.      Since the bogey score seemed irrelevant as a mark of the fine player anymore, a new term began to be used and the concept of “par” was born.     With par at about 72 compared to the old bogey score of 80, the difference between the two is 1 more stroke per hole and thus that became known as bogey for that hole.

Coming back to the “bogey man”, shortly after that term started being used, a club in Gosport, England installed the hypothetical “Mr. Bogey” in their roster as a joke.   Because Gosport had many military officers in their roster, one of their customs was to assign an honorary rank to new civilian members.    The club secretary decided that a player as accomplished as Mr. Bogey (who theoretically played to scratch) deserved no less a rank than colonel.    “Colonel Bogey” was thus born, and he became a figure in English culture as an icon of discipline and courage for their armed forces.   After all, Colonel Bogey was able to prevail in any golf match, in any conditions, and still shoot scratch!     For those who remember the movie “Bridge on the River Kwai”, the catchy tune whistled by the POWs wasn’t written for the movie – it was an established military standard called “Colonel Bogey’s March”.

[mvmac]

Interesting, thanks!