Beat my mate at golf with 37 stableford points, and got a sun tan on the course as a bonus.
The Stableford Story
Dr. Frank Barney Gordon Stableford (1870–1959)
As you know, golf is a game that requires a person to strike a small ball with a club from the teeing ground into a distant hole while following The Rules. It is supposed to be fun. Keeping score is part of the joy. Most people understand the simplest scoring method: one swing at the ball - usually resulting in a more-or-less successful hit - equals one stroke. The lowest score wins, which is fair as long as the competitors are of similar ability. The use of a handicap factor - an allowance of strokes given to a player based on past and current performance - permits golfers of all levels to compete together on an equitable basis.
One day long ago, at a course in England called Wallasey in Cheshire, a man with a handlebar mustache and a plus-1 handicap was playing the par-4 second hole, made unreachable by a wind whipping off the Irish Sea. As he pondered the injustice of one bad hole ruining an entire scorecard (and an entire day), he had an idea of resurrecting a concept that he devised some years earlier in Wales. The man was Dr. Frank Barney Gordon Stableford. His scoring system - a point for a net bogey, two for a net par, three for a net birdie, and so on -was first tried out in a competition in 1932. It was an instant hit.
Whenever The Golf Guru is asked about scoring formats, the doctor's ingenious remedy is always prescribed. The Stableford system is simple, works for all golfers, and can be applied to any situation or combination of players (even hungover bachelors). It's fast, too, because you can pick up if you're not going to make at least a net bogey. Dr. Stableford might have been a great physician, but it was his simple idea on a windy day that truly eradicated a lot of suffering from the world.
The STABLEFORD method of scoring, a system used and revered by golfers all over the world, was first devised by Dr. Stableford when he was a Glamorganshire Gold Club member (which is in Penarth, near Cardiff in South Wales) and was first tried out on the members of this club on the 30th September 1898. His new system was announced in a South Wales newspaper that reported on the Golf club's first autumn meeting.
There was no stroke indexing when Dr. Frank Stableford first decided to experiment with his revolutionary system. All holes were played to par and the Stableford points applied. At the end of the game one third of the players handicap was added to the overall Stableford score. The maximum handicap for the event was fifteen. The system therefore favoured the better golfer at the time which is hardly surprising as the good doctor was a single figure handicapper. Dr. Stabelford didn’t participate in his initial experiment though he donated a special prize to the winner, W Hastings Watson, who scored a remarkable forty two points.
There is no indication of what the members thought about the alternative of scoring by points or, indeed, whether they tried it out on any other occasion. Dr. Stableford, who lived in Whitchurch at the time, went off to serve as an Army Surgeon in the Boer War and on his return rejoined Porthcawl. He won the Porthcawl Championship in 1907 and in the same year reached the semi-final of the Welsh/Cymru Amateur Championship.
He later moved to Liverpool in England, just across the border, around 1914 and joined both the Royal Liverpool and Wallasey Clubs. He was a first-rate golfer and physician who served with distinction and decoration in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Mad Mullah of Somaliland uprising, the Boer War and during World War I held the rank of Colonel.
He was a flamboyant man, wearing bright bow ties and driving around in a yellow Rolls Royce, but he was a serious golfer, forever studying the mechanics of his swing.
By this time he was sixty one years old and his golfing prowess was no longer the same as when he was a young man. Instead of applying the system to the better golfer he adapted it to the general club golfer. The only adjustment that he made was adding the players’ full handicap to his Stabelford score. The “crazy doctor’s new system” was used in competition at Wallasey on the 16th May 1932. Later that year he changed the point scoring to that which survives to this day. Handicap strokes were not added on at the end, but were taken at the relevant holes.
One might argue that the Stableford scoring system does not offer enough reward for good play. After all, a birdie is worth only a little more than a par, and an eagle a little more than a birdie. Surely, these golf achievements are associated with far greater joy and satisfaction than the point differential would suggest. Similarly, the negative feeling generated by a very large score (with 0 Stableford points) is undoubtedly much greater than the acceptable bogey (with 1 Stableford point). It is not entirely clear what Stableford had in mind when he devised this scoring system - equity or quality of life (QOL). In this study, we explore the Stableford scoring system as it pertains to golf-related quality of life (GRQOL).
The members at the Wallasey Golf Club embraced the new system with great enthusiasm. Wallasey nurtured and promoted the system so successfully that it is now played throughout the golfing world.
What Dr. Stabelford had now accomplished was a fairer scoring system that made it possible for a golfer to mess up a few holes and yet still turn in a respectable score; his ingenious idea, which obviously stayed in his mind for a long time before it was generally accepted, has enabled millions of golfers to do just that.
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