Grip It and Weep: The 10 Highest Hole Scores in Pro Golf
Published on July 17th, 2026 2:00 pm ESTWritten By: Dave Manuel
The ten highest single-hole scores ever taken by professional golfers, ranked and fully told: Tommy Armour's legendary and disputed 23 at the 1927 Shawnee Open, Philippe Porquier's 20 at the 1978 French Open (still the official European Tour record), Ray Ainsley's 19 at the 1938 US Open - played stroke by stroke from a moving creek because he did not know he was allowed to drop - plus the ice plant at Cypress Point, the beach at Pebble, fourteen swings in one Japanese bush, a boulder ravine at the 1919 US Open, John Daly's six balls in the water at Bay Hill, a deliberate seventeen played in protest, and Kevin Na's televised 16 that needed video review to count. Who, where, when, and exactly how each disaster happened - with the fine print on which numbers are certified and which are legend.
Sports-King Feature
The Blow-Up Files
A ball played out of a moving creek. A tee shot swallowed by ice plant. Ten straight drives out of bounds, six balls in the same pond, and one case of the shanks so severe it entered the record books. The ten highest single-hole scores ever taken by professional golfers - who, where, when, and precisely how it all went wrong.
Scoring · Hole by Hole · All ErasARMOUR23*AINSLEY+15NA141516The volunteers checked the numbers twice. Then a third time.
Golf is the only major sport with no ceiling on catastrophe. A quarterback's worst play loses one down; a striker's worst miss costs one chance; but a professional golfer standing over a ball has no referee, no clock and no mercy rule - only the obligation to keep swinging until the thing goes in. This file collects the ten times it went most spectacularly wrong: the highest single-hole scores ever recorded by professional golfers, across the PGA Tour, the European Tour, the Japan Tour and the majors. The membership requirements are steep - nothing under 16 strokes qualifies - and the stories behind the numbers are better than the numbers: a US Open contender who did not know he was allowed to take a drop, a club pro marooned on a beach beneath Cypress Point, a Japanese veteran who needed fourteen swings to escape one bush, and a temper tantrum that earned its owner a suspension. At the top sits the most famous number in golf-disaster lore, a 23 whose very existence is disputed - and this article, unlike most that print it, tells you that part too. Sixteen strokes minimum. Grip it and weep.
Entry Fee16 strokes
The Record23*
Worst in a Major19
Most Balls Drowned6
1
The most famous score that may never have happened
The Score23, as always told
The SettingShawnee Open, 1927
The TimingA week after his US Open win
One Version10 straight drives OB
AnotherThe yips, on the green
The CatchGolf historians cannot verify it
The signature: the number that coined the archaeopteryx - fifteen over par or worse - attached to a man who had just beaten Bobby Jones for the US Open
Every list of golf catastrophes starts here, and this one starts here honestly. The story: one week after winning the 1927 US Open, Tommy Armour - the Silver Scot, eventual three-time major champion - ran up a 23 on a par 5 at the Shawnee Open, eighteen over par, the first recorded instance of what came to be called an archaeopteryx, the term for a single-hole score of fifteen over or worse. The tellings disagree on the mechanism: the most common version has him launching ten consecutive drives out of bounds; another blames a sudden attack of the yips. And here is what most retellings leave out: the score cannot be verified. Contemporary documentation is thin, accounts vary on the number itself, and the sport's most careful records-keepers regard the 23 as somewhere between exaggeration and outright tall tale - one specialist archive flatly calls it a story that never happened, even as national outlets keep printing it (at least one has even transplanted the 23 onto Ray Ainsley, who appears at No. 3 with his own, fully documented disaster). We rank it first because it is the number the whole genre is built on; the asterisk is load-bearing, and the fine print carries the full dispute. If it happened, it is the worst hole a professional ever played. If it did not, it is the greatest fish story in golf.
2
The official European Tour record
The Score20, on the par-5 13th
The VenueLa Baule, France
The AfflictionA catastrophic case of the shanks
The ContextFollowing an opening 82
The RoundA 98
The StatusStill the tour record, per the tour
The signature: the highest verified single-hole score on any major professional tour - listed to this day in the European Tour's own record book
Where Armour's 23 lives in legend, Philippe Porquier's 20 lives in the ledger: when the DP World Tour published fifty statistics for its fiftieth anniversary, there it sat under most strokes on one hole - 20, Philippe Porquier, 1978 French Open. The Frenchman arrived at La Baule's 13th, a par 5 of just over 500 yards, already reeling from an opening 82, and contracted golf's most contagious disease at the worst possible moment: the shanks. Ball after ball squirted sideways off the hosel and out of bounds, several lost entirely, until the hole had consumed twenty strokes and his second round had swollen to 98. Nearly half a century of European Tour golf has passed - tens of thousands of rounds, in every weather the continent can produce - and nobody has matched it; the closest anyone has come is 17, managed twice (a story the record book tells in the margins below). Porquier's 20 is the highest single-hole score in professional golf that no one disputes, which in this genre makes it something close to sacred.
3
The worst hole in major championship history
The Score19, par-4 16th
The VenueCherry Hills, Denver
The StageThe US Open
The TrapA creek with a current
The ProblemHe did not know he could drop
The StatusStill the US Open and PGA Tour record
The signature: a professional stood in a moving stream hacking at a drifting ball because nobody had told him the rules offered a way out
The highest score ever recorded in a major championship belongs to Ray Ainsley, a California club professional whose approach at Cherry Hills' par-4 16th found the creek guarding the green during the 1938 US Open - and who then made the decision that immortalized him: he played it as it lay. In moving water. Stroke after stroke, the current carried the ball further downstream as Ainsley thrashed at it; by the time he finally extracted it - one account has the escape coming with his 17th swing, the ball flying past the hole into trees on the far side - the damage was done, and he holed out for 19, fifteen over par. The immortal detail arrived afterward, when an official asked why he had never taken a drop and Ainsley explained that he did not know he was allowed to: he believed the rules required him to play the ball as it lay, wherever it lay, even mid-river. Some spectators insisted the true count ran a stroke or two higher. Eighty-eight years later, no one has topped it at a US Open or in an official PGA Tour event, and the PGA Tour still recognizes the 19 as the worst in its history - a record set by a man whose only sin was taking the rulebook more literally than the rulebook takes itself.
4
The beach beneath the 16th
The Score19, par-3 16th
The VenueCypress Point
The EventBing Crosby National Pro-Am
The Fall75 feet down to the beach
The CaptorIce plant
The EndingMissed the putt for 18
The signature: sixteen strokes to reach the green of a par 3 - from a beach, through a succulent, at the most beautiful hole in golf
Cypress Point's 16th is routinely called the most beautiful par 3 on earth, which made it the perfect stage for the cruelest 19 ever recorded. At the 1959 Bing Crosby National Pro-Am, club pro Hans Merrell watched his tee shot fall short and tumble roughly 75 feet down to the beach below the green, where the Monterey Peninsula's signature vegetation - ice plant, a dense, rubbery succulent that swallows clubheads whole - was waiting. Merrell took his drop on the sand and hit straight back into the ice plant; hacked, dropped again, and hacked some more; and did not reach the putting surface until his sixteenth stroke. He then narrowly missed the 20-foot putt that would have given him a merely apocalyptic 18, and tapped in for 19 - sixteen over par on a par 3, statistically the joint-worst ratio of score to par in this entire file. It stands as one of two 19s produced by the Crosby's stretch of coastline in five years, which tells you everything about what that event asked of club professionals playing seaside golf in January.
5
The beach at Pebble's 10th
The Score19, par-4 10th
The VenuePebble Beach
The EventThe 1963 Crosby
The SliceOnto the beach
Lying 14Finally back in the fairway
The CareerA fine one, otherwise
The signature: a future 14-time professional winner needed 14 strokes just to reach the fairway - then found a bunker with his 15th
Four years after Merrell's ordeal at Cypress, the Crosby claimed its second 19 a few miles up the coast. In the final round of the 1963 edition, Dale Douglass sliced his tee shot at Pebble Beach's par-4 10th onto the beach below the fairway cliffs, and what followed was a study in the arithmetic of futility: swing after swing off the sand, unplayable lie after unplayable lie, until Douglass finally regained the fairway lying fourteen. His fifteenth found the greenside bunker. A splash-out and two putts later he had his 19, fifteen over par - and, unlike most residents of this list, a genuinely distinguished career still ahead of him: Douglass went on to win three times on the PGA Tour and eleven more times on the senior circuit, a resume that makes his appearance here oddly comforting. The lesson of ranks 4 and 5, taken together, is geographic: in the space of five Januarys, the Monterey coastline did to two professionals what no inland course has ever done to one.
6
The Japan Tour's contribution to history
The Score19, par-3 8th
The VenueIshioka Golf Club
The TourJapan Golf Tour
The CaptorOne bush, 14 strokes
The MercyNo three-putt
The QuoteMore reporters than the leader
The signature: the most concentrated disaster ever recorded - fourteen consecutive swings at a ball lodged in a single patch of bushes
The modern era's entry in the 19 club came from Japan, and it may be the most claustrophobic disaster ever recorded. At the 2006 Acom International, 38-year-old Mitsuhiro Tateyama put his ball into the rough at Ishioka Golf Club's par-3 8th, moved it into a stand of bushes - and then spent fourteen strokes trying to leave. Swing after swing disappeared into the same vegetation, the ball refusing to emerge, until the escape finally came and Tateyama walked off with a 19: sixteen over par on a par 3, matching Merrell's Cypress Point ratio for the worst in professional history. Two details elevate it. First, the small mercy he pointed out himself - he did not three-putt. Second, the quote, delivered with a laugh that belongs in the genre's hall of fame: there were more reporters around me than for the leader. It remains the highest single-hole score in Japan Golf Tour history, and proof that this list is not an artifact of scratchy pre-war scorekeeping - a 19 happened in the age of television, lasers and launch monitors, one bush at a time.
7
The oldest entry on the list
The Score18, par-3 8th
The VenueBrae Burn, Massachusetts
The StageThe 1919 US Open
The TrapA boulder-strewn ravine
The MethodChipping off rock
The LoreHis partner kept the count
The signature: the first great single-hole catastrophe of championship golf - a Scotsman versus a ravine, with the ravine winning by double digits
The genre's founding document was written at the 1919 US Open at Brae Burn, where Scottish professional Willie Chisholm arrived at the par-3 8th and left, an eternity later, with an 18. His tee shot found the rocky ravine fronting the green, and Chisholm elected to play it from among the boulders - sparks-off-granite golf, stroke upon stroke ricocheting around the gully while the ball declined every invitation to leave. The count grew so long that keeping it became its own task; the story handed down through a century of retellings has his playing partner tracking the strokes and delivering the total to a disbelieving Chisholm at the end, a piece of lore we pass along as exactly that. What is documented is the number - fifteen over par on a par 3, the worst single hole in US Open history until Ainsley arrived nineteen years later - and the vintage: more than a century on, Chisholm's 18 remains the oldest verified entry in professional golf's book of horrors, from an era when the equipment was hickory but the ravines were already regulation depth.
8
The most on-brand disaster ever recorded
The Score18, par-5 6th
The VenueBay Hill, Orlando
The MethodSix balls into the lake
The RefusalWould not lay up
The ResumeAlso owns a 14 and a 13
The EraFully modern, fully televised era
The signature: the only man on this list who reached his number by refusing, six consecutive times, to stop going for the green
Every other disaster in this file happened to its golfer; John Daly's was a choice, made six times in a row. At the 1998 Bay Hill Invitational, on the par-5 6th that curls around a lake, Daly decided the green was reachable in two - and kept deciding it as ball after ball after ball dived into the water, six in all, each splash followed not by a chastened lay-up but by another heroic lash at the flag. The final tally was 18, thirteen over par - the highest score of the modern PGA Tour era, with only the trio of pre-1964 nineteens above it in Tour history and Chisholm's ravine beside it. What certifies Daly as the genre's laureate rather than its victim is the rest of his ledger: he separately owns a 14 and a 13 on Tour, giving him three of the most catastrophic holes in modern history, all constructed from the same material - a swing built for glory and a temperament allergic to the safe play. The galleries, it must be said, never loved him more.
9
The self-inflicted seventeen
The Score17, par-4 17th
The VenueSeneca, Louisville muni
The CausePure fury
The Method7-iron chips, tee to green
The SentenceA 30-day suspension
On AppealA fine + 90 days probation
The signature: the only score on this list taken on purpose - a protest played one deliberate chip at a time, and priced by the Tour accordingly
Rank 9 is the list's black sheep, because George Bayer's 17 was not a catastrophe - it was a demonstration. Bayer, one of the longest hitters of his generation, arrived at the 17th at Seneca, Louisville's municipal course, during the 1957 Kentucky Derby Open seething over his play, and chose an unforgettable protest: he took a 7-iron and chipped his ball the entire length of the par 4, one deliberate little punch at a time, seventeen strokes of performative disgust. The Tour was not amused: Bayer was suspended for 30 days, and only after he apologized was the sentence reduced - to a fine and 90 days of probation, making him the only member of this list punished for his number rather than merely haunted by it. The coda is the season's great redemption arc: roughly three months later, probation presumably still in force, Bayer won his first PGA Tour title at the Canadian Open. It earns its place on a technicality the others would resent: everyone else here was trying desperately to score lower. Bayer proved that in golf, unlike any other sport, a professional can protest the game using nothing but the game itself - and that the game will invoice him for it.
10
The only fully documented entry
The Score16, par-4 9th
The VenueTPC San Antonio
The OrdealNearly 20 minutes
The CrueltyBall ricocheted off a tree into him
The CountAdjusted 14, 15, then 16 on video
The KickerHe birdied the last
The signature: the only score in this file verified frame by frame - it took video review to establish that the answer was sixteen
The list closes with its only entry that exists on tape. At the 2011 Valero Texas Open, Kevin Na stood on the 9th tee at TPC San Antonio at one under par; twenty minutes of televised agony later, he was eleven over. The drive vanished right into the trees and Texas scrub; an unplayable sent him back to the tee; a whiff followed in the woods; one recovery attempt ricocheted off a trunk and struck him, adding a penalty to the injury; and five consecutive strokes were played from inside the thicket before the ball finally saw daylight. The score itself needed forensics - announced as 14, revised to 15, and settled at 16 only after Na and officials reviewed the broadcast video before he signed his card, the first great single-hole disaster to require replay review. Two footnotes complete it: Na birdied the 18th, meaning he played the other seventeen holes in four under; and the whole sequence lives permanently online, where it has taught millions of viewers the lesson every earlier entry on this list could only describe - that for a professional golfer, the distance between one-under and oblivion can be a single tee shot wide.
The Full Docket
The ranked ten plus every neighboring disaster the archives preserve - the other sixteens, the fifteens, the unofficial fourteen at Augusta, and the two men who matched each other's seventeens on the European Tour. Gold rows are the ranked entries; the red rows carry an asterisk explained in the notes column.
| Year | Golfer | Event | The Damage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1927 | Tommy Armour | Shawnee Open | 23 on a par 5 - contested by golf historians; the founding legend, flagged as such |
| 1978 | Philippe Porquier | French Open (ET) | 20 on the par-5 13th at La Baule - the official European Tour record |
| 1938 | Ray Ainsley | US Open, Cherry Hills | 19 on the par-4 16th - played from a moving creek; still the US Open and PGA Tour record |
| 1959 | Hans Merrell | Crosby, Cypress Point | 19 on the par-3 16th - beached, then imprisoned by ice plant |
| 1963 | Dale Douglass | Crosby, Pebble Beach | 19 on the par-4 10th - lying 14 before reaching the fairway |
| 2006 | Mitsuhiro Tateyama | Acom Intl (Japan) | 19 on the par-3 8th - fourteen strokes in one bush; Japan Tour record |
| 1919 | Willie Chisholm | US Open, Brae Burn | 18 on the par-3 8th - played from a boulder ravine; the oldest verified entry |
| 1998 | John Daly | Bay Hill | 18 on the par-5 6th - six balls in the water, all going for it |
| 1957 | George Bayer | Kentucky Derby Open | 17 on the par-4 17th - deliberate 7-iron protest; suspended 30 days, reduced on apology to a fine and probation |
| 2011 | Kevin Na | Valero Texas Open | 16 on the par-4 9th - settled at 16 only after video review |
| 1954 | Ed Oliver | Crosby, Cypress Point | 16 on the par-3 16th - the same hole that got Merrell five years later |
| 1986 | Gary McCord | St. Jude Classic | 16 on the par-5 16th at Colonial CC, Memphis - by the future broadcaster |
| 1958 | Bill Collins | Denver Open | 15 on the par-4 17th at Wellshire |
| 1950 | Hermann Tissies | The Open, Royal Troon | 15 on the par-3 Postage Stamp - by an amateur, ping-ponging between bunkers |
| 2005 | Billy Casper | The Masters | 14 on the par-3 16th, five balls in the pond at 73 - unofficial: he never returned the card |
| 2015 | Andrey Pavlov | Austria Open (ET) | 17 on the par-5 1st - six in the water; tied for 2nd-worst in ET history |
| 2003 | Chris Gane | Gleneagles (ET) | 17 - the other half of the European Tour's second-worst tie |
The Arithmetic
Three ways to measure a catastrophe: the raw number, the distance from par, and the body count in the water.
The highest single-hole scores, professionals
The gap between the contested 23 and the certified 20 is the gap between legend and ledger. Everything from 19 down is documented in contemporaneous accounts or, in Na's case, on video.
Strokes over par, the worst ratios
Measured against par, the par-3 disasters take over: Tateyama and Merrell's nineteens were sixteen over on holes designed to take three. Armour's +18 keeps its asterisk here too.
Balls in the water, documented cases
Daly and Pavlov drowned six each, 17 years apart, on par 5s they refused to respect. Casper's five at Augusta came on a 170-yard par 3 in his farewell Masters - the round he chose, mercifully, not to turn in.
The Record Book
The margins of the file: Augusta's own wing of the museum, the unofficial fourteen, the sixteens that missed the cut, and why the biggest number of all keeps mutating in the retelling.
The Augusta WingThe Masters maintains its own boutique collection. The official single-hole record is 13, held jointly: Tsuneyuki Nakajima's 1978 masterpiece at the par-5 13th (a ball that popped onto his own shoe for two penalty strokes, then a club grounded in the hazard during a botched caddie handoff for two more), Tom Weiskopf's 1980 ordeal at the par-3 12th (a tee shot that spun back into Rae's Creek, followed by four more balls from the drop zone), and Sergio Garcia's 2018 entry at the 15th, five balls spinning off the green into the pond a year after he won the tournament. That no one has reached 14 officially at Augusta is a testament to either the membership's scorekeeping or the players' pride - because one man did reach 14, and the next card explains why it does not count.
The Unofficial FourteenIn 2005, at his farewell Masters, 73-year-old former champion Billy Casper put five consecutive balls into the pond at the par-3 16th - I just kept hitting it to the left, he explained, I got five balls within a nest there - and carded a 14 on the way to a round of 106, which would have shattered the tournament's single-round record of 95. Would have: Casper declined to return his scorecard, accepting disqualification instead, which keeps both numbers officially nonexistent. It was, in its way, the most dignified disaster in this entire file - a champion choosing the record book over his own place in it, and proof that at Augusta, even the catastrophes are curated.
The Sixteens That Missed the CutTwo more sixteens live just outside the ranked ten. Ed Porky Oliver's, at the 1954 Crosby, came at Cypress Point's par-3 16th - the very hole that would claim Merrell's 19 five years later, confirming that stretch of coastline as the most dangerous 200 yards in tournament golf. Gary McCord's, at the 1986 St. Jude Classic in Memphis, gained retroactive comedy when its author became one of television's most famous golf broadcasters, forever qualified to narrate other people's disasters with the authority of the genre's alumni. Bill Collins' 15 at the 1958 Denver Open and amateur Hermann Tissies' 15 - achieved by ping-ponging between the Postage Stamp's bunkers at the 1950 Open - complete the near-miss shelf.
Why the Big Number Keeps MutatingA note on epistemology, because this genre needs one. The PGA Tour's official single-hole records begin only in 1983; everything earlier survives through newspaper accounts and championship record books, which is why the numbers wobble in the retelling. Armour's 23 cannot be pinned to contemporary documentation, and at least one national outlet has printed the 23 as belonging to Ray Ainsley - whose meticulous, witnessed, official 19 needs no inflation. Even Na's 16, played on live television, had to be settled by video review after being announced as 14 and then 15. The lesson runs through the whole file: golf's disasters grow in the telling, precisely because the sport that produces them is the only one where the victim must also serve as the scorekeeper.
Sports-King's Note
Now for the fine print. Methodology first: the list covers professional golfers in professional tour events and majors, ranked by raw score; ties are ordered chronologically, and where multiple golfers share a score outside the ranked ten they appear in the docket. Sourcing: the PGA Tour's official single-hole records begin in 1983, so pre-1983 entries rest on contemporaneous news accounts and championship record books, phrased accordingly. The Armour 23 is presented as what it is - the genre's founding legend, printed by most outlets with hedges, with accounts differing on both mechanism (ten drives out of bounds in most tellings, the yips in others) and even the number, and regarded by careful golf-records specialists as unverifiable; we rank it first for its place in the sport's lore and flag it with an asterisk throughout. Porquier's 20 is the European Tour's own listed record (par-5 13th, La Baule; one aggregator misprints it as a par 3). Ainsley's 19 is the recognized US Open and PGA Tour record, with the spectator claims of a higher count noted; the detail that he learned of the drop option only afterward is from the standard accounts. Daly's 18 came at the par-5 6th at Bay Hill (a minority of sources misplace it at the 16th). Bayer's sentence follows his specialist biography - a 30-day suspension, reduced after his apology to a fine and 90 days' probation - and we note that a circulating variant instead claims a $200 fine and a served 90-day suspension; the Chisholm counting lore is attributed as lore. Na's 16 details - the ricochet penalty, five straight from the woods, and the 14-to-15-to-16 video adjustment - are from the Tour and contemporaneous wire reporting. Tissies was an amateur and Casper's 14 is unofficial (card never returned); both are therefore in the docket and margins rather than the ranked ten. Update trigger: any new score of 16 or worse in a professional tour event joins the docket, and any archival scholarship that settles the Armour question - in either direction - rewrites rank one.One Last Word
Read the ten together and a strange comfort emerges: almost nobody on this list was a bad golfer. A US Open champion the week of his triumph, a future 14-time winner, a three-time major champion at his farewell, a big-hitting fan favorite, a man who would spend decades narrating the sport on television. The blow-up hole is not a skill problem. It is golf's oldest design feature - the reminder, written in creek water and ice plant, that the game never has to let anyone finish.
The hard numbers, for the road: the highest verified single-hole score by a professional is Porquier's 20, the official European Tour record; the highest in a major and on the PGA Tour is Ainsley's 19 from 1938, shared since by Merrell, Douglass and Tateyama across three tours and two continents; the worst against par is sixteen over, managed twice on par 3s; the most balls drowned on one hole is Daly's and Pavlov's six; the modern record you can actually watch is Na's 16, which needed video review to count; and the number at the top, Armour's 23, remains golf's great unverifiable - too famous to omit, too thin to certify. What every entry shares is the sport's unique arithmetic of mercy, which is that there is none: no clock ran out, no manager intervened, no whistle blew. Ten professionals kept swinging because the rules of golf offered them nothing else - and the game wrote their numbers down, the way it writes down everything.
