(1625) The history of kolf reaches beyond reliable written records, though it is believed by many to be tied to the development of
golf. Documents as far back as the year 1200 mention four popular games involving both club and ball: chole in Belgium and
France,
jeu de mail in France, and beugelen and the
Klosbaan in the Netherlands. • Chole was probably the closest to modern golf. It was played with
iron-headed clubs and a wooden ball, and the aim was to reach a given target in the minimum number of strokes. •
Jeu de mail was not dissimilar, except that it was played with a metal hammer. It could be played on a course, but the most popular form was mail a la chicane, which went cross country. • The two Dutch sports, beugelen and the klosbaan, both involved hitting the ball through a narrow gap on the course. Beugelen still survives, in fact, and can be seen in the southern Dutch
province of
Limburg. In the interchange of fashion and trade, all these games tended to spill across to neighboring regions. The Netherlands developed its own version of jeu de mail, which it called maliespel, about the same time as the
English court set up a mail course on the wide avenue now known as Pall Mail (i.e. pallemaille). But it was a combination of jeu de mail and chole which seems to have appealed most to the sporting instincts of the Dutch. They called the new game colf, and within a few years they had become a nation of passionate players. The game was played in the streets, in public squares, or anywhere there was sufficient space. Sometimes the players set up a pole which they could use as a target, other times they simply picked a handy local landmark. The winner was the one who reached the chosen point in the minimum number of strokes. The cost of all this sporting activity, mainly in broken windows, was not welcomed by the authorities. Indeed, the best indication of the sport's widespread popularity is the number of official ordinances which were made against it. In
Amsterdam, for instance, colf players were banned from the long and narrow street known as the Nes, under penalty of having their cloth confiscated. In 1456 they were banned from playing around and inside the church at
Naarden. In many other cities and towns they were relegated to playing outside municipal limits. In winter, at least, the problem was less severe - when the canals and lakes froze over, many Dutch colf players took to the ice, finding an ideal playing surface and all the space they needed. The game was often featured in frozen river scenes in paintings. At some time during the
Middle Ages, the colf craze seems to have travelled across the
North Sea to the Netherlands' neighbouring trading partner, Scotland. While the Scots rightly claim to have invented the modern game of golf, the origins of the game that was to become golf were brought to Scotland by Scots merchants who had traded in the
Low Countries. The game was brought to
St Andrews from
Hanseatic ports where colf was commonly played at the time. The Dutch sport was adapted to local conditions whereby it came to be played on what were termed 'links' in the Scots language. Links is a descriptive term for coastal sandy grasslands. The term has since become almost synonymous with the modern golf course, thanks to the Scots. Oddly, while Scotland was developing its own interpretation of colf as a spacious outdoor game, which would eventually morph into the modern game of golf, the Dutch were doing exactly the opposite with colf. Instead of playing in the open, more and more were adapting the game to a form that could be played on the old maliespel courses, which mostly adjoined taverns and inns. Increasingly, the courses were roofed over until finally, the new game was entirely played indoors. Thus was born the unique Dutch game of kolf. From the beginning of the 18th century, the game caught on quickly. Records show that by 1769 there were about 200 courses in Amsterdam alone of which more than 30 were covered. In 1792, there were 350 courses in the whole of the Netherlands, almost half of them covered. Initially, players used the same sticks as they had for colf, with bails made of tightly-wound wool, covered with leather. However, as kolf developed, a larger ball came into use that was more suitable for the new form of the game, and the sticks became correspondingly heavier. A major technical breakthrough came when balls made of
gutta-percha, an early form of rubber, were introduced. Those balls were larger still, the gutta-percha softer and less resilient than the rubber of today. They were used in addition to the wool-and-leather balls, rather than replacing them. No one is certain why kolf swiftly began to fade in popularity towards the end of the last century. There was competition from newer sports such as
soccer and
cycling, of course, but a more likely reason seems to be that the cafe owners who operated most of the courses found that they were no longer economical. One by one, the courses fell into disuse, and the space was used otherwise. Now many old cafés' dance floors or
billiard tables hide what once was a kolf course. Of the 14 courses still in use, all but one are in the tiny villages of the northern part of
North Holland. The one course found outside North Holland is in
Utrecht, in the St. Eloyen Gasthuis (
St. Eloy's Hospice). The beautiful course is the oldest in the Netherlands; although it has been restored more than once, its history dates back to 1730. The Gasthuis (or old
hospice) is a building owned by the city’s ancient guild of metalsmiths. An obstacle encountered with a sport as old as kolf is obtaining the proper equipment. There are a few craftsmen who still make the special metal-headed klieks used to play but almost none who manufacture balls of the right material or quality needed for the sport. Fortunately, the manufacture of the surviving equipment is excellent, and the life of both the sticks and balls is long. Most modern players use equipment that has been passed from father to son or friend to friend, or is borrowed from a club. Some players make their own wool-cored balls, or restore old ones which have already given many years' service. Most of the leather balls in use are at least 80 years old, which makes them true sporting antiques; the trouble is that modern rubber balls bounce too much for the kolf course, making for a less traditional experience. ==References==