Every golfer knows what a mulligan is. Take a crap shot, pretend it didn’t happen, tee up another, and that first yank into the lagoon is ancient history. It’s not in the rulebook. It’s not legal in any tournament that matters. Yet it’s one of the most universally practiced traditions in the entire sport.
What almost nobody knows is where the word actually came from. This, I discovered, is mostly because nobody can agree on it. There are at least three competing origin stories, none of them provable, and one baseball theory that somehow makes the most sense out of all of them.
Story one: the nervous hotelier. The most widely told version centers on a Canadian golfer named David Mulligan, playing at the Country Club of Montreal sometime in the 1920s. According to Mulligan himself, in a 1952 interview, he hit a long but crooked drive off the first tee, got frustrated, and impulsively re-teed and hit again on the spot. His playing partners asked what on earth he was doing. He told them he was taking a “correction shot.” When pressed for a better name, he offered “mulligan,” and somehow it stuck for the next hundred years.
Story two: the shaken chauffeur. A slightly different telling has David Mulligan not frustrated but rattled. Literally. He’d driven his foursome to the club over a rough, bumpy road (some versions mention railroad ties), and he was apparently still shaking when he got to the first tee. Like he was a martini about to be served up to 007 himself. He shanked it and his friends gave him a free extra shot out of pity for the ride he’d just endured, and dubbed it a ‘mulligan’ ever after.
Story three: the underpaid locker room attendant. A completely separate origin story, from Essex Fells Country Club in New Jersey, credits a man named John “Buddy” Mulligan. He was not a wealthy hotelier, but a working locker room attendant who occasionally got roped into playing with members. His version has some stank on it. Reportedly, after a rough opening shot, he told his golfing partners something to the effect of: ‘this is a fraud, you two have been out here practicing all morning, and I’m expected to play cold off one warm-up swing? The least you can do is let me hit another.’ They agreed, and named it after him on the spot.
Story four, and possibly the real one: it came from baseball. Word historians have traced the earliest documented use of “mulligan” as a golf term to 1931 in the Detroit Free Press, which referred to both a ‘do-over’ in golf and a powerful shot. The leading theory now, resulting at least partially from said article, is that the term actually migrated over from baseball slang. It was tied to a fictional, larger-than-life slugger named “Swat Mulligan” who appeared in early 1900s sports writing. A “mulligan” first meant a hard-hit ball in baseball, then got adopted into golf to describe a long drive, and eventually evolved into today’s meaning of a do-over. Which would mean every golfer named Mulligan who’s ever taken credit for it may have just been telling a really good story, decades after the word already existed. Here’s the quote for reference:
“All were waiting to see what Byrd would do on the 290-yard 18th, with a creek in front of the well-elevated green. His first drive barely missed carrying the creek and he was given a “mulligan” just for fun. The second not only was over the creek on the fly, but was within a few inches of the elevated green. That’s some poke!“
The bottom line. Nobody actually knows for certain, and at this point, nobody ever will. What we do know is that the mulligan has outlived every man who claims to have invented it, survived a hundred years of casual rounds, and remains the single most reliable way to erase your worst swing of the day without a blow to your ego, or your scorecard.
Next time you take one, you’re technically participating in a mystery nobody’s solved. Feel free to make up your own origin story on the spot. That’s basically how we got here in the first place. You just gotta love golf.
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