12 Wild Golf Facts We Learned From the Guy Who Built a Daily Golf Trivia Game

Games have become part of the daily internet routine. You play the game. Screenshot the results. Send to the group chat. And everyone has their game(s).

Wordle with your coffee.
Quordle if you’re an overachiever.
The Mini at lunch.
GeoHistory when you should probably be answering emails.

But if you’re a sports fan, nothing beats sports trivia. And golf, perhaps more than most sports, feels uniquely suited to the format.

Golf sickos love knowing things. Obscure major championship records. The architectural quirks of famous courses. Who hit it farther, who putted it better, and who somehow won despite doing neither particularly well. And, naturally, we love having an excuse to deploy that completely unnecessary knowledge in the group chat.

So when we came across Caddyshanks Daily Games, a new collection of four golf games that refresh every morning, it made immediate sense. The games bounce between PGA Tour stats, player careers, golf history, head-to-head matchups, and even the geography of famous courses. They’re quick, competitive, and seemingly engineered to start arguments among your golf buddies. Win, win.

They also require digging through some pretty obscure corners of golf history to create.

So we caught up with Caddyshanks co-creator Josey Orr to find out what he learned while building the games. We asked him for the stats, records, and wonderfully useless bits of golf knowledge that made him stop and say, Wait, seriously?

Here are 12 of his favorites.

Big Board

Gaining a full stroke per round off the tee for an entire season is one of golf’s rarest feats. Only four players have ever done it: Bubba Watson, Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, and Sergio Garcia. Bubba’s 2012 mark of +1.485 strokes gained off the tee is still the best single season of the strokes-gained era.

In 2023, Scottie Scheffler became the first player ever to lead the PGA Tour in both SG: Off the Tee and SG: Approach in the same season. Since ShotLink started tracking strokes gained in 2004, nobody had swept both ball-striking categories until Scheffler did it.

Despite the bomb-and-gouge era, approach play (not driving) is the stat that best separates the world’s elite. Analyses of strokes-gained data consistently show SG: Approach explains more of the gap between top players than SG: Off the Tee. Drive for show, hit your irons for dough.

Scouting Report

Jack Nicklaus holds the record for major wins (18) and the record for major runner-up finishes (19). That’s 37 times the Golden Bear finished first or second in a major. More top-twos than most Hall of Famers have top-tens.

The oldest major champion in history is Phil Mickelson, who won the 2021 PGA Championship at Kiawah Island at age 50, breaking a record (Julius Boros, 48) that had stood for more than half a century.

In 1945, Byron Nelson won 11 tournaments in a row and 18 total that season. The next-best streak ever is Tiger Woods’ seven in a row in 2006–07, still four short. It’s widely considered the most unbreakable record in golf.

Tiger Woods made the cut in 142 consecutive PGA Tour events from 1998 to 2005. The next-best streak in history is Byron Nelson’s 113. Nobody active today has come remotely close.

Going Streaking

Who shot the lowest round in PGA Tour history, Jim Furyk or Tiger Woods? Not close. Furyk owns the record 58 (2016 Travelers) and a 59 (2013 BMW Championship), while Tiger, with 82 wins and 15 majors, has never gone lower than 61 in an official Tour round.

Who has more career PGA Tour wins, Sam Snead or Tiger Woods? Trick question. They’re tied at 82, the all-time record. Snead got his last win at 52 years old. Tiger tied him at the 2019 Zozo Championship.

In 2011, Luke Donald ranked T-147th on Tour in driving distance and still finished the year No. 1 in the world, becoming the first player ever to top the PGA Tour and European Tour money lists in the same season. How? He led the Tour in SG: Putting, gaining +0.844 strokes per round on the greens. Pick him over the bombers in any putting matchup.

Mileage Marker

The most remote golf course on Earth is on Tristan da Cunha, a volcanic island in the South Atlantic sitting 1,243 miles from its nearest neighbor, Saint Helena. The 9-hole course has no true greens. And the grass is kept short by grazing cattle.

Golf’s elevation range spans more than 15,000 vertical feet. Furnace Creek in Death Valley sits 214 feet below sea level, the lowest course in the world. While a 9-hole course in Nepal’s Upper Mustang region, opened in 2022, sits above 15,000 feet. Club selection gets weird at both.

Facts like these are baked into every puzzle at games.caddyshanks.co. Four new games every morning. Each one over before your coffee’s cold. Play the day’s puzzles, post your score to the chat, and make your buddies explain why they thought St. Andrews was 400 miles from Pebble Beach.