GOLF in Argentina
History of Golf
ccording to some historians, golf orginated in The Netherlands, but in ancient times, there was a very popular game among the Romans, for which they used a bent stick and a ball made with feathers. This may have been the inspiration for the modern sport. However, according to records, the game we know today was invented by the Scots between the XIV and the XV centuries.
This sport became so popular in Scotland that the Scottish parliament had to pass a law prohibitting this game in order to keep people from practising this activity when they should have been practising archery, which represented a military necessity. Anyway, the Scots did not pay attention to these regulations and in the early XVI century, king James IV of Scotland took up the game. His granddaughter Mary, later Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, would play the game in France, where she was raised. Also in England, the game became very popular due to the attention paid to it by the monarchy before the Civil War.
The first golf associations were created in the XVIII century. Thus, the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers was established in 1744; the St. Andrews Society of Golfers, in 1754 (which adopted its present name in 1834); the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews and the Royal Blackheath, in 1766. The first clubs to be founded outside England were the Calcutta Golf Club of East India, created in 1829 and the Royal Bombay Club, in 1842. In the western world, the first golf club was the Canada's Royal Montreal Golf Club, founded in 1873.
Even if no written records exist, there are reasons to believe that golf was played in the US during colonial times. In 1888, the St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers was founded in New York. It is said that this is the oldest golf club continuously existing in the US.
Golf is also popular in several countries in Western Europe, Canada, South Africa and Australia, and it experienced a remarkable growth in Japan after World War II, in 1945.
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Towards the late XIX century, golf had hardly taken roots in Argentina. There were only five golf clubs and each of them would regulate their own inner competitions and administrate handicaps for their members. Therefore, if an annual national championship was to be organized, it was necessary to have minimum organization. This was managed in a meeting among all participating clubs to determine the terms of the competition. A "Silver Cup" was scheduled to be played annually. The winner would be considered the "River Plate Amateur Champion".
In 1897, The River Plate Amateur Championship Executive was founded to be in charge of the organization of the championship, adopting the Match Play as its game system.
Thus, this sport was developing as a result of the increasing number of clubs and the sudden interest of the high porteño society in this game.
In 1905, the first genuinily Argentinian club was created (the Golf Club Argentino), and three years later, the interclub championships started to be played. As time went by, new clubs were created and competitions increased. The golf regulations arriving from the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of Saint Andrews had to be adopted and interpreted, and it was necessary to unify the handicaps.
