Colonel Bogey and the Bogey Competition
How the 1890s ground score became Colonel Bogey, how bogey drifted from good score to one over par, and why the C&RBGC plays match play against him.
Before par, there was bogey—and bogey was not a number on a card but an opponent. The C&RBGC's official format, match play against Colonel Bogey, is not an invention; it is a revival of how ordinary club golf was scored in the 1890s, and the Colonel himself has a service record.
The ground score
In 1890 Hugh Rotherham, secretary of the Coventry Golf Club, proposed fixing a "ground score" for each hole—the score a good golfer should make on it—so that a member could play a standardized match even without an opponent of the right caliber. The idea spread quickly because it solved a real problem: medal play punishes one disastrous hole forever, while a match against the ground score resets at every tee.
The name came a year or so later at Great Yarmouth, where Dr. Thomas Browne ran matches against the ground score while a music-hall song—"Hush! Hush! Hush! Here Comes the Bogey Man"—was the popular tune of the day. A player remarked that this phantom opponent, always in with his number, was a regular Bogey man, and the ground score became "Mr. Bogey": the imaginary member who never missed.
The commission arrived in 1892 at the United Services Golf Club at Gosport, where every member held military rank. A mere mister could not be admitted to play, so the club's phantom was gazetted with a rank befitting his steadiness. Mr. Bogey became Colonel Bogey, and the name stuck across Britain. (The "Colonel Bogey March" of 1914 took its title from the golf term—its composer is said to have been inspired by a golfer who whistled a falling two-note interval in place of shouting "fore.")
From good score to one over
Bogey originally meant something close to what par means now: the score of a sound, unhurried golfer. The drift began when the American game standardized par by yardage in the early twentieth century and the livelier rubber-cored ball made the old ground scores a stroke soft on many holes. Par became the expert's standard, bogey settled one stroke above it, and an opponent became an epithet. Britain held the older meaning longer, but by the steel-shaft era the Colonel had everywhere been demoted from "what a good player shoots" to "one worse than expected"—a small tragedy of modernization in miniature.
The format outlived the meaning. Bogey competition survives in the Rules of Golf to this day as a recognized form of stroke play scored like match play: against a fixed score on each hole you are up, down, or halved; once you can no longer win or halve a hole you pick up; your result is your margin in holes, not your total. Its virtues are exactly what the medal lacks. Every hole is self-contained, a blow-up costs one hole rather than the round, it works identically over three holes or thirty-six, and it suits foursomes, since the side plays the phantom as one.
The Colonel and the Club
The C&RBGC's Standing Rules restore the Colonel to active duty. The Bogey Standard holds that bogey is the target—every hole playable to bogey, regardless of actual difficulty—and that Colonel Bogey scores bogey on every hole of every course, without effort or joy. The bogey competition is the Club's official format, the margin against the Colonel is the Club's only arithmetic, and the founding motto—"We can make bogey here, right?"—names the target hole by hole rather than as a fixed total, since a single number only ever described one length of round.
This is the older orientation of the game in working form: a walking match against a steady phantom, decided hole by hole, with the score kept in stories. See Golf's Original Constraints and Recovering Golf's Original Orientation for the argument running underneath it.
