About UF Golf Course: What This Record Covers, and How

Four subjects, each with a section: course records, the figures that determine how a course plays, set out as data rather than description; golf history, how the game reached America, disappeared, and returned; tournament records, edition sequences and the format changes inside them; and golf betting, how the markets are structured and what each bet type settles on.

The editorial preference throughout is for the checkable over the evocative. A course is more usefully described by its par distribution, its rating and slope, and what a renovation changed than by an adjective about its beauty. Where a subject genuinely has no settled answer (the first golf course in America is the clearest example), the disagreement is set out rather than resolved into one confident date.

Every figure is attributed to a source and dated to it. The scorecard on the Mark Bostick Golf Course profile is transcribed from the operator's own published card as it stood in 2013, and it says so on the page, because a course's figures change with renovation and re-rating.

Three rules follow from that. Where a source contradicts itself, the contradiction is reproduced: the operator's pages gave the property as both 110 and 116 acres, and both appear. Where a figure is derived rather than found, the derivation is shown. Where the record has a hole, the hole is marked rather than filled with an estimate.

This site is a publication about golf courses, not a golf course. It takes no bookings, sells no memberships, and speaks for no operator. The Mark Bostick Golf Course at the University of Florida is documented here as a subject; it is owned and operated by The University Athletic Association, Inc., and anyone needing current green fees, tee availability or event entry should go to the operator directly.

It is also not a results archive. Tournament pages record editions, formats and the changes between them; where no contemporary source published a finishing order, none is given.

This is a secondary source, and it says so because the distinction changes what a reader should do with it. Nothing here was observed first-hand: every figure was read off a document somebody else produced: an operator's published card, a club's own history, a governing body's record of its founding. The work done here is collecting those, dating them, and recording where they disagree.

So if a figure from these pages is going into something that matters, cite what this record cites. Where a page names its source, that source is the citation; where a page says a figure is derived, the two facts under the derivation are the citation and the arithmetic is reproducible. A reference that cites a reference has moved one step further from the document and gained nothing.

Two consequences follow, and both are limits rather than modesty. This record cannot be used to establish a fact it does not name a source for. Several founding entries here rest on general reference rather than on a document, and the dataset marks them as unsourced rather than implying otherwise. And it cannot be used as evidence about the present: a card dated 2013 is evidence about 2013, and a course rating is evidence about the tees as they were rated.

What this record is good for is the shape of a question: which readings of "first" exist, what a scorecard column means, why two clubs both hold a defensible claim. That is the part a primary document rarely supplies, because a document answers its own question and not the one a reader arrived with.

Corrections are welcome, particularly on dated figures and on editions missing from a tournament sequence. A correction is most useful when it names the source it comes from, because the point of the record is traceability rather than consensus.

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