“I doubt whether any single man did more to increase the pleasure of the humble club golfer...”
The great writer and commentator Henry Longhurst said this about Dr Frank Stableford, who gave his name to the most popular points scoring system ever to be adopted in the game (although there are pros and cons to all golf formats).
Stableford, who played off +1 and a club champion at Royal Porthcawl, was a surgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps and his work took him to Wallasey on the Wirral in Merseyside where he joined in 1914.
When he returned to the club in 1922 after serving as a major with the RAMC his handicap had risen to 8 and supposedly he had become frustrated with the bogey scoring system at the time.
By the mid to late 1890s, the term 'bogey score' referred to the ideal score a good player could be expected to make on a hole under perfect conditions. It was also used to describe strokeplay tournaments. By the late 1900s/early 1910s the concept of par began.
Given Wallasey's location next to the coast and the strong winds that go with that, Stableford was unable to reach some of the longer par 4s in two and he then came up with a formula to make the game more enjoyable.
He had previously devised a scoring system when a member of Glamorganshire in 1898. That involved using the scores from the normal bogey competition and turning them into points but the system was deemed unsatisfactory and didn't go any further.
A game-changing introduction
Now though, he introduced what is now the Stableford scoring system, which awarded points based on on the number of strokes taken on each hole. The scoring is calculated using your score against the net par for that hole, so wherever you receive a stroke based on your handicap, with points awarded as follows:
– 5 points – Three strokes under
– 4 points – Two strokes under
– 3 points – One stroke under
– 2 points – Level par
– 1 point – One stroke over
– 0 points – Two strokes or more over
“I was practising on the 2nd fairway at Wallasey Golf Club one day in the latter part of 1931 when the thought ran through my mind that many players in competitions got very little fun since they tore up their cards after playing only a few holes and I wondered if anything could be done about it.”
There is a plaque beside the 2nd tee at Wallasey and, if you've played the hole into the wind, then you'll soon appreciate why they picked this hole to mark Stableford.
Which brings us to the word blob and how it has seeped into the golfing vernacular.
A blob is when you fail to score a point on a certain hole. In strokeplay you would have to finish every hole while your card is still live, but in Stableford you can pick up any time and write it off as a blob.
It's uncertain when it was first used, but it's hard to imagine us using a different word for it these days. But, while it is a less taxing format than strokeplay, a run of blobs will certainly get your attention and a big, fat zero in the points column will quickly get your attention.
