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What does "links" mean in golf?

Dear Sports Fan,

What does “links” mean in golf?

Thanks,
Wade

Dear Wade,

The term, “links” has two meanings within golf. It is used generally to refer to the course that golf is played on. A golfer might say to a friend of hers, “sorry, I can’t come over and collect kindling with you because I’m going to hit the links today. It also has a more technical meaning, referring to a particular type or style of golf course. If you haven’t ever bothered to dig into the history of the word links, you might find it easy to invent reasons for its general meaning. Viewed from above, a golf course, with its many kidney shaped fairways and greens, can look a little like a string of sausages. Perhaps that’s why it’s described as links? If you’ve never seen it written, you might think that it’s not “links” but “lynx,” the genus of small, predatory, wild cats. Why a cat? Who knows? Half of golf terms seem to be birds, so why not throw a cat in there? In truth, the history of the use of the word “links” in golf can be traced all the way back to the very beginning of the sport.

Although the very first golf-like games may have been played in what is now the Netherlands as early as 1261, golf historians tend to trace a direct line from Scotland in the 1400s to today. Golf must have been a fairly common sport by the mid-1400s and just as addictive as its modern counterpart, because in 1457 it was officially prohibited by the King of Scotland. Early golf enthusiasts faced several difficulties. As we already know, golf was outlawed at times, but even when it was legal, you needed a lot of uninhabited, non-farm land to play it on. The solution that many Scottish golfers found was to create courses near the shore, where the earth was sandy and the water brackish. Useless for farming, this land was ideal for the sport in many ways. The grasses that grew tended “to have short blades with long roots,” which made it hearty enough to survive being hit with clubs and balls, and when nibbled short by livestock, smooth enough for the ball to run on. The hard ground also encouraged the ball to bounce and roll further. The landscape also came with many natural impediments to golf – wind and rain blowing in from the sea, small streams that ran through the land and sandier patches that stopped the grass from growing and the ball from rolling. Instead of resisting these features, golfers embraced the challenge, and indeed, water hazards and sand traps are the two main artificially created obstacles on modern golf courses. The word the Scots used to describe this environment was “links” which comes from the Old English, hlinc, meaning “rising ground” or “ridge.”

Golf is no longer illegal and there are courses spread around the world in every environment imaginable. Although it can be used as a general term, links has retained its meaning as being descriptive of a certain style of golf course set in a particular type of environment. The most obvious visual difference between a non-links and a links course is that a links course will have few or no trees. Unlike a modern course, where the fairways (a safer area to set up a golfer’s next shot, because it has shorter, more even grass) and the rough (the opposite) are easily visually distinguished by color and texture, on links courses they are more difficult to distinguish. The same goes for the course’s greens which, on modern courses are planted with very soft grass to make the ball slow down and roll, but which on links courses may be more similar to the rest of the course. Water and sand are the key obstacles in all styles of golf course, but on links courses, they are either naturally occurring or carefully designed to give that impression. A key difference on links courses is the presence of some very dramatic walls that hold a green back from a sandy bunker.

As a result of the topographical and environmental differences, success on a links course requires different techniques from other courses. Tina Mickelson addresses this on a post she wrote for the PGA website. She identifies three key differences:

Because of the wind on links courses, players should drive the ball (the first and usually longest shot on any given hole) with a lower trajectory than on other courses.
Since the texture of the grass doesn’t vary as much between fairway and green, players should let the ball bounce up and onto the green as opposed to trying to loft it into the air and have it stick on the green.
The sand bunkers on links courses tend to be much more treacherous than on other courses. Mickelson recommends practicing very high shots out of sand, to get over the walls, and extreme prudence. It’s better to hit the ball the wrong way but onto the grass than it is to get stuck in the sand for shot after shot.

Golf enjoys tradition as much as any sport and as such, there’s a certain prestige to links courses. The downside of this is that lost of golf courses that don’t really fit the description of a links course call themselves one anyway, for marketing reasons. The benefit of golf’s attraction to its own past is that it gives The British Open, the only major tournament always played on a true links course, the enjoyable and rosy glow of long history and tradition.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What do the 20 most common strange soccer terms mean?

Soccer has always has an air of “otherness” in the United States. It’s the major world sport we are the worst at. Somehow in the 1960s or 70s, it became culturally associated with the liberal political leanings that often went along with an inclination towards international and particularly European ideas and culture. Unlike ice hockey, which is still primarily a Canadian and European sport, the best soccer leagues in the world do not reside in the United States. For all these reasons, soccer terminology remains opaque to many casual fans or non-fans of the sport. To help with this problem, here are definitions for the 20 most common strange soccer terms.

Cap – Not part of a team’s uniform (or kit — bonus word!), a cap is an appearance on a country’s national team. The number of caps a player has is used as a sign of how experienced she is.
Nil – Fancy sounding word for zero. Used by British and Anglophilic soccer fans.
Pitch – The field of play. As in, the place you would pitch the ball from if you were playing baseball or cricket.
False nine – Soccer has a traditional system or systems of numbers that refer to positions. Nine is the striker or forward. A team is said to be using a false nine when their farthest forward player frequently drops back farther than a normal striker would.
Stoppage/injury/added time – Soccer is the only timed sport whose official clock is kept secret during the game. Only the ref knows how much time is really left. Stoppage time, injury time, and added time are all phrases used to refer to the period between when 45 minutes have elapsed from the start of a half to when the referee blows her whistle to end the game. The ref announces an estimate of how many minutes this will be at the end of each half but he is not held to it.
4-4-2 – A common soccer formation. In numerically expressed formations like this, the numbers refer to the players in each level of play, starting on defense, right after the goalie. 4-4-2 is four defenders, four midfielders, and two forwards.
Clean sheet – Close to synonymous with a shutout in American sports. Credit for a clean sheet is usually given to a team’s goalie and defenders. Some may even have contractual bonuses for clean sheets.
Switch the field – To pass the ball a long way across the field. An attacking team may switch the ball from the left side to the right if they aren’t having success creating offensive chances on the original side.
Golazo – An unusually beautiful goal. The creativity and technical excellence of the goal matter more for qualification as a golazo than the importance of the goal.
Nutmeg – When one player tricks another player by passing, shooting, or dribbling the ball between their opponent’s legs. The term’s derivation is disputed but one great theory involves spice counterfeiting.
Parking the bus – When one team commits all their resources to defending. This can be a good strategy against a superior team. The U.S. Women’s National Team expects that a lot of their opponents will play this way against them.
Advantage – If a team has a foul committed on them but would be disadvantaged by stopping the game, a referee can choose to play or call advantage and let the play continue. If the foul warrants a yellow or red card, the ref can give the offending player her card the next time the game stops.
Professional foul – An intentional foul committed by a player (usually a defender) to prevent a scoring chance. The best professional fouls are ones that anticipate the action by enough to avoid being penalized specifically for taking a scoring chance away from the other team.
Through ball – A pass that is designed to go behind the opposing team’s defensive line where it can be picked up by a teammate of the player passing the ball.
Tiki-taka – A style of play, popularized by the Spanish men’s national team, that relies on high volume, relatively safe short passes to move the ball and maintain possession. World soccer seems to be at the tail end of a time when this style was ascendant.
Woodwork – The goals may no longer be made out of wood, but the goal posts (sides) and cross bar (top) are still referred to by their original material. A shot that hits the goal may be said to leave the “woodwork” ringing.
Work rate – An imaginary stat that refers to how hard a player is playing. Technology has recently made it possible to quantify part of this by tracking how far each player runs during a game. Central or defensive midfielders usually have the highest work rates and sure enough, they usually run the farthest.
Overlap – A common track a player might run in relative to her teammate who has the ball. Overlapping or running an overlap is to run between the player with the ball and the sideline, from behind the player to ahead of her. This serves to give the player with the ball a passing option and also to stretch the defensive players farther away from each other by forcing one of them to follow the player making the overlap run.
Booking – When a referee disciplines a player by giving him a yellow or red card. Two yellows in one game or a single (called a straight) red means immediate expulsion from the game. After being expelled, the player’s team has to play the rest of the game down a player, they cannot add a substitute.
Cynical – A play that violates unwritten rules. On offense, this usually applies to flagrant simulation or diving. On defense, this is normally a professional foul. A foul need not be violent to qualify as cynical.

Who had the term "field goal" first, basketball or football?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was surprised to learn that there are field goals in basketball as well as football. What’s up with that? Who had the term “field goal” first, basketball or football?

Thanks,
Ivan

Dear Ivan,

The term field goal refers to one way of scoring in both football and basketball. As we covered in our How does scoring work across sports post, in football, a field goal is when a team kicks the ball between the uprights not directly after a touchdown. In basketball, it’s a more general term that covers the majority of shot attempts. The only way to score in basketball that doesn’t count as a field goal is the free throw, an undefended shot awarded to a team that has been fouled in particular circumstances. As for which sport had the term first, there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to that question but the smart money is on football as having had it first.

Basketball has a very distinct creation story. The sport was invented by James Naismith, a gym teacher at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891. His 13 rules of basketball are become a treasured document in the sports history. Nowhere in those rules does the term field goal show up, but he uses the word field to refer to the area of play and goals to refer to made baskets. The leap to using the term field goal to refer to a subset of the goals is not a big one, particularly because he did carve out goals that would be awarded in a different way. In the original rules of basketball, a team that was on the receiving end of three straight fouls from the other team would be awarded on goal.

Football is an older sport and came about in a more evolutionary way than basketball. I don’t know exactly when there were first more than one way to score in football but by 1883, safely eight years before basketball was invented, one of the pioneer rule makers, Walter Camp, was already tinkering with how much different types of scoring should be worth, including the field goal. He settled on “four points for a touchdown, two points for kicks after touchdowns, two points for safeties, and five for field goals.”

The only article I could find explicitly addressing your question was this one by Mark Lieberman on the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log blog. The article is well worth reading, as is the discussion in the comments section.

In terms of why the distinction matters in basketball, one main reason that it helps generate the commonly used statistic of field goal percentage. Field goal percentage is roughly the number of shots made divided by the number of shots attempted. This stat is a traditional one used to express how efficiently a player scores. Free throws (which are not counted as field goals) are excluded from this calculation. On one hand, this makes the statistic more useful because it isolates one skill (shooting within the flow of the game) from another (converting free throws.) On the other hand, points from free throws are worth just as much as points from other shots, and a possession that ends with a player being fouled is usually thought of as an offensive success, but in terms of field goal percentage would not show up at all. This type of gap between statistic and reality is why we have had so many new statistics invented in the past ten years.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What is a nutmeg in soccer?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a nutmeg in soccer? And why does it have such a crazy name?

-Naomi

Dear Naomi,

Nutmeg is a colorful term used in soccer that refers to when one player directs the ball intentionally between the legs of another player. It’s similar to the ice hockey term, “five hole” which we wrote about earlier this week but the two are not interchangeable. Whether it’s a shot that goes between the goalie’s legs on its way into the net, a pass to a teammate that goes between a defenders legs, or if a player dribbles literally right through another player and keeps control of the ball, getting nutmegged is one of the most humiliating moments in soccer. Soccer is a very territorial sport. I often think of soccer teams as being made of a semi-viscous material that stretches between nodes centered on each player. To score in soccer, you need to find a point between players where the material is thin enough to be punctured. As an attacking team gets closer and closer to a defender, the material gets thicker and harder to break through. Going directly through a player is usually too difficult to even be worth attempting. A nutmeg is the ultimate breakdown of this rule. A defender who gets nutmegged has failed his or her team in the most basic way.

The derivation of the term nutmeg is a mystery with several plausible solutions. The Wikipedia entry on the topic and a 2005 article from The Guardian list the same three possibilities:

That it comes from the slang use of the word “nuts” to mean testicles. If the soccer players are male, then a nutmeg will involve the ball traveling directly under the nutmegged players nuts. It’s also plausible to think of it as a term of admiration referring to the brazenness of the player making the attempt.
The second possible derivation is that it stems from English rhyming slang that replaced the word “leg” with “nutmeg.” In this case, nutmeg refers to what the ball passes between instead of underneath.
The last possibility and the one that The Guardian likes the best, is that nutmeg gained its soccer meaning from an 1870s practice of deceit on the part of spice importers who would hide some wooden carvings in their shipments of nutmeg to lower their cost and raise their profits. This practice led to use of the word nutmeg to generally mean, “to be tricked or deceived, especially in a manner which makes the victim look foolish” which is a perfect match for how it feels to get nutmegged in soccer.

Whichever derivation you prefer, it’s interesting to see how many of the words for this action in other languages also have some element of food in them. All according to the same Wikipedia article:

In Hispanic America there are four words for nutmeg and three of them have a food element – caño which means spout, ordeñar which means milk, and cocina which literally means kitchen.
In Jamaica, it’s called salad.
Brazil has three words for it and one of them, rolinho, means little roll.
In Hungarian, the word for nutmeg is kötény which means apron.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a real blog post if I didn’t suggest another, totally unfounded, theory about nutmeg. Getting nutmegged is harmful in many ways. It’s humiliating to be faked out and beaten so badly. It’s also bad, potentially very damaging for the team to have allowed a player to go through what should have been a defensive stronghold. Perhaps nutmeg was an apt word to use because it too can be harmful. Nutmeg is not only a spice, it’s also a reasonably strong drug. A New York Times article from 2014 on the subject describes the experience of consuming too much nutmeg as “not exactly comatose, but… really sluggish.” Playing the ball through an opponent’s legs is the most effective way to make him or her look “not exactly comatose, but really sluggish.”

Could the use of the term nutmeg in soccer come from the experience or observation of a person suffering through a bad nutmeg trip? Who knows! It’s fun to think about. While you ponder, enjoy a highlight reel of some amazing nutmegs.

Thanks for asking,
Ezra