Obviously, the first thing that the brief for this article demanded was a little bit of maths on my part, for I am not sad enough to carry round in my head the number of golf holes I’ve played in my life.
But I do know that I have played 1,047 courses as of April 2025 (some may say knowing that figure is nearly as sad), so the first thing to do was to tot up the number of non-18-holers among them, most of which have been nine-holers, though not all. That came to 156, meaning 1,404 golf holes on a nine-hole basis. The remaining 991 18-holers brought a further 17,838 into the mix for a grand total of 19,242 golf holes from which to choose.
