Golf started on the eastern coast of Scotland in the 1400's; players would hit a rock around a course using a stick.

In the 1400's, King James II banned both golf and soccer; worried that warriors were spending too much time playing and not enough preparing for a coming invasion from England.

Years after the game was banned; kings and queens made golf popular through Europe; King Charles I introduced the game to England and Mary Queen of Scots introduced it to France.

The "Gentlemen Golfers of Leith" was the first club with a yearly competition and prize; to win their silver golf club, you had to promise to play the ball where it landed, even if it hit "any person, horse or dog."

When the game started, clubs used the wood from fruit trees, but some heads were made from iron; the golf ball had horse hide wrapped tightly around crushed feathers.

The first golf club outside Scotland was Royal Blackheath near London, the first golf club outside Britain was in India; a country owned by England at the time.

As railways opened up the countryside; middle-class workers could visit the surrounding towns; golf clubs popped up all over England and then the United States as these tourists golfed at a different club every weekend.

At one point, handmade golf clubs and balls were so expensive that only the wealthy played, but that changed; clubs were mass produced and a doctor showed how people could make their own golf ball with a bit of rubbery sap from a gutta-percha tree.

A golf ball has dimples, little marks all over the surface; this started when people discovered that their homemade gutta-percha balls flew straighter if they didn't smooth them out.

Today, golfers like Tiger Woods make millions of dollars a year; in the 1800's golfers would earn a few dollars by teaching, making clubs and balls, or putting bets on games.

The Professional Golfers' Association of America (PGA) formed in 1916, it wasn't until 1934 that the organization started tracking; which tournaments offered prize money and which golfers were taking home the most.

The player who had once been the youngest man to win the Masters; a famous golf tournament, also became the oldest man who win; Jack Nicklaus won when he was 23 and again when he was 46 (plus four times in between).

Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods turned professional in 1996 after years of success in the "Junior" golf league; Nike and Titleist immediately signed him up for commercials for a combined $60 million.

In 1927, a man named Garnet Carter created a game called "Tom Thumb Golf" in Tennessee; he wanted to get people to come to his hotel.

The Carter miniature golf course had obstacles designed to look like a fairyland; Frieda Carter designed the whole thing even though her husband, Garnet Carter, got the patent on it.

The most holes of miniature golf played by a team in 24 hours is an amazing 1,140, two teams from MGC Olympia Kiel in Germany set that record in 2005.