Golf scores (scoring an "even" in stroke play will always give a Stableford score of 36), discouraging the tendency to abandon the entire game after playing a particularly bad hole (a novice playing by strict rules may score as high as an 8 or 10 on a single difficult hole; their Stableford score for the hole would be zero, which puts them only two points behind par no matter how badly they played), and the ability to simply pick up one's ball once it is impossible to score any points for the hole, which speeds play. The USGA and R&A sanction
History of golf number of strokes into a target several hundred yards away. Some scholars argue that this game of putting a small ball in a hole in the ground using "golf clubs" was also played in 17th-century Netherlands and that this predates the game in Scotland. There are also other reports of earlier accounts of a golf-like game from continental Europe. In the 1261 Middle Dutch manuscript of the Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant's "Boeck Merlijn" mention is made of a ball game "mit ener coluen" (with a colf/kolf [club]). This is the earliest known mention in the Dutch language of the