Golf Terms : Golf: Birdie, Par & Bogey

The terms birdie, par and bogey are used to describe your golf score in relation to par. Learn more about these golf terms from a professional golf instructor in this free sports video.

Expert: Hill Marks
Bio: Coach Hill has been teaching tennis, squash, racquetball and golf professionally for about ten years.
Filmmaker: Dustin Daniels

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Closed Caption:

Okay when you're playing golf, we've covered
this just a little bit but your goal on every
hole should be to get a par because that means,
if it's a par four you're going to get two
strokes to get around the green and then you're
either going to make your chip close and make
the putt, or you're going to be on the green
in two, and two puts so that will be your
par. So if you hit a great second shot that
might leave you a short putt to make your
birdie but you always have to count on trying
to get a par on every hole and that would
mean that you're a pretty proficient golfer.
A bogey just means somewhere along the line
you've lost a shot, whether you three putted,
put a ball out of bounds, put a ball in thick
rough and had to recover from it, behind a
tree. There's so many things that can go wrong,
that sometimes saving a bogey is a good thing.
Then a birdie is when everything goes right
for the most part and you hit a couple great
shots, and you get close to the hole and make
the putt. So there's par fives, there's par
fours, and there's par three's. Par three's
are usually going to be under two hundred
and eighty yards, anything above that will
be a par four, and anything over four hundred
and sixty yards will be a par five. Now those
are the distances the pros play at but for
the recreational player the distances might
be not quite as long, but that's generally
what it is. If you really are interested in
this topic there's some good books or other
reference material you can scour and really
learn what all this stuff means. That's just
a good brief overview of what par, birdie,
and bogey mean.