US Golf Courses on Record: Scorecards, Course Rating and Slope

A scorecard carries more information than its layout suggests, and most of it is in the relationships between columns rather than in any single number. Par is the least informative figure on the card: two par-70 courses can differ by 900 yards and by fifteen strokes of practical difficulty.

The useful reading starts with the split between the nines. A course whose two halves are close in both par and yardage (the Mark Bostick Golf Course, for instance, runs par 35 out and par 35 in, 3362 yards against 3339) has no easy half to recover in. A course with a short front and a long back sets up a different kind of round entirely, and players who fade late will score worse on it than the totals suggest.

The distribution of pars matters more than their sum. Six par threes and two par fives over eighteen holes, as at the Mark Bostick Golf Course, concentrates the scoring pressure on long par fours, where there is no second shot to recover with and no green reachable in two. The same par 70 built from four threes and four fives plays completely differently.

Finally, the number of tee sets tells you who the course is for. Four sets spanning 1582 yards, as here, means one routing is being asked to serve a competitive programme and a casual visitor at the same time.

One row that a card normally carries is worth knowing by name, because it is the one most players never use. The handicap row, the stroke index, numbers the holes 1 to 18 in order of difficulty, and it decides where a handicap's strokes fall rather than how many there are. A player receiving nine strokes takes them on the holes indexed 1 to 9, not on the first nine holes. In match play the same row settles which hole a stroke applies to, so two players can agree on their handicaps and still disagree on a hole if they read it wrongly.

The card published for the Mark Bostick Golf Course did not carry one. What it carried was par, the hole numbers, and four tee yardages, which is why the table above has those columns and no stroke index. Recording the absence is more useful than supplying an index from another source and letting it read as this course's own.

It carried something less common instead. Several holes carried a second, shorter measurement on the published card (holes 7, 10, 13 and 16 from the white tees; holes 12, 14 and 15 from the red). Both values are kept. A second measurement on a single hole usually means an alternate tee position in regular use, and it is the kind of detail that disappears the first time a card is retyped.

Course rating and slope are the two figures most often printed and least often understood. Course rating is the score a scratch golfer is expected to average on the course from that tee, so a rating of 72.4 against a par of 70 means the course plays roughly 2.4 strokes harder than par for the best amateurs.

Slope measures something different: how much harder the course gets for a bogey golfer relative to a scratch golfer. A slope of 128 is above the neutral value of 113, meaning the course punishes the weaker player disproportionately. Two courses can share a rating and differ sharply in slope, and the one with the higher slope is the one a mid-handicap group will find unpleasant.

Read together they are more useful than either alone. Comparing the four tee sets at a single course shows this directly: the shortest set here is 1,582 yards shorter than the longest, yet its rating is 68.4 against 72.4, a gap of only 4.0 strokes. Length is not difficulty.

Stated plainly, because the two terms are usually given together and defined separately. Course rating is a score: the strokes a scratch golfer is expected to average from that tee, printed to one decimal. Slope rating is not a score at all: it is a ratio expressed as a whole number, describing how much faster the course punishes a bogey golfer than a scratch golfer. It runs from 55 to 155, and 113 is the neutral value: a course at 113 treats the weaker player exactly as an average course does.

So the difference between them is what they answer. Rating answers "how hard is this course for a good player", in strokes. Slope answers "how much worse will that get for me", as a multiplier. A course can be gentle on the first measure and brutal on the second, and the combination is what a player actually experiences. Across the four tee sets recorded here the rating moves from 67.5 to 72.4 and the slope from 118 to 128: one piece of ground, four different questions answered.

And length is not the answer to either. The White tees measure 5,773 yards and are rated 67.5; the Red tees measure 5,119, which is 654 yards shorter, and are rated 68.4, which is 0.9 strokes harder. A rating belongs to a tee and to the player set it was rated for, so two ratings on one card are not always answering for the same golfer. Yardage is one input among several, alongside obstacles, width and the approach to each green.

A last word on the top of the scale, because "the highest slope rating" is a question people ask and the answer is usually given as a name. The ceiling is 155, and a course near it is not simply long. Length raises the rating for everybody, while slope only rises when the difficulty is of a kind that a bogey golfer pays for far more than a scratch golfer does: forced carries, narrow landing areas, recovery shots that require a struck long iron rather than a chip. That is why a punishing links can sit lower than a shorter course built over water. No figure is quoted here for the highest-rated course in the country, because a slope is issued per tee by a rating authority and is revised when a course changes, and a name published without the tee and the year it was rated is not a fact anyone can check.

The reason to look either figure up is the same: they convert a handicap index, which belongs to the player, into a course handicap, which belongs to the round. Under the World Handicap System the arithmetic is one line: index multiplied by slope over 113, plus the difference between the course rating and par:

course handicap = index × (slope ÷ 113) + (course rating − par)

Worked on the figures above, with par 70, a player carrying an index of 15.0 does not play off 15 anywhere on this course. From the Orange tees, at rating 72.4 and slope 128, the same index becomes 19. From the Red tees it becomes 14. That is 5 strokes of difference on one piece of ground, for one player, on the same afternoon, decided entirely by which markers the group plays from.

Two things follow. A handicap quoted without a tee is incomplete, which is why a card prints rating and slope for every set rather than once. And the term "playing off scratch" describes an index, not a course: a scratch player still receives strokes on a course rated above its par, and gives them back on one rated below.

Every term on this page is defined in the glossary, with a link back to where it does real work.