Kolven
Encyclopedia
- For the computer game see Kolf (computer game)Kolf (computer game)Kolf is a miniature golf game for KDE, that was developed by Jason Katz-Brown in 2002. The game is played from an overhead view, with a short bar representing the golf club. Kolf features many different types of objects, such water hazards, slopes, sand traps, and black holes , among others...
.
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, played by several individuals with heavy curved bats (kliek
Kliek
A kliek is a heavy curved bat to play kolf with.-Literature:*Kolven, het plaisir om sig in dezelve te diverteren. Uitgave 2001 van de Kolfclub Utrecht St. Eloyen Gasthuis. -External links:...
s) and a ball
Ball
A ball is a round, usually spherical but sometimes ovoid, object with various uses. It is used in ball games, where the play of the game follows the state of the ball as it is hit, kicked or thrown by players. Balls can also be used for simpler activities, such as catch, marbles and juggling...
between two poles on an indoor kolf court
Court
A court is a form of tribunal, often a governmental institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law...
. It is similar to the more well known game of golf
Golf
Golf is a precision club and ball sport, in which competing players use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a golf course using the fewest number of strokes....
, but has its own unique characteristics.
Game
Kolf is played on an indoor course some 17.5 metres long and 5 metres wide, marked with looping scoring lines, and with an ornate wooden post planted at each end. Nowadays, a Kolf courtCourt
A court is a form of tribunal, often a governmental institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law...
has a floor made of a sort of plastic
Plastic
A plastic material is any of a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic solids used in the manufacture of industrial products. Plastics are typically polymers of high molecular mass, and may contain other substances to improve performance and/or reduce production costs...
and needs to be as water-level as possible.
There are three players
Player (game)
A player of a game is a participant therein. The term 'player' is used with this same meaning both in game theory and in ordinary recreational games....
in a match and each has his own ball. The balls are quite large and are made either of rubber
Rubber
Natural rubber, also called India rubber or caoutchouc, is an elastomer that was originally derived from latex, a milky colloid produced by some plants. The plants would be ‘tapped’, that is, an incision made into the bark of the tree and the sticky, milk colored latex sap collected and refined...
or sajet (wool
Wool
Wool is the textile fiber obtained from sheep and certain other animals, including cashmere from goats, mohair from goats, qiviut from muskoxen, vicuña, alpaca, camel from animals in the camel family, and angora from rabbits....
covered with leather
Leather
Leather is a durable and flexible material created via the tanning of putrescible animal rawhide and skin, primarily cattlehide. It can be produced through different manufacturing processes, ranging from cottage industry to heavy industry.-Forms:...
). The rubber balls are the most popular, although they have to be at least 80–100 years old before they are fully mature. The older the rubber gets, the less spring it has; this in turn encourages a better roll and that in Kolf is most important.
The club used, known as a kliek
Kliek
A kliek is a heavy curved bat to play kolf with.-Literature:*Kolven, het plaisir om sig in dezelve te diverteren. Uitgave 2001 van de Kolfclub Utrecht St. Eloyen Gasthuis. -External links:...
, has a very strong wooden shaft and a heavy metal
Metal
A metal , is an element, compound, or alloy that is a good conductor of both electricity and heat. Metals are usually malleable and shiny, that is they reflect most of incident light...
head. The head on the kliek used for the rubber ball is somewhat larger than that used for the sajetball, the reason being that the rubber ball is slightly larger and heavier.
The aim of the game is to hit the post at the far end, having started from the starting post. Then one is to hit the post at the starting end and return the ball back to the far end, or scoring end. This is all to be done in three strokes. The posts are set at an angle of 85% towards each other, so that the balls don’t jump when they hit the posts.
In playing the game, the player often makes use of rebounds on the walls of the court, similar to billiards
Billiards
Cue sports , also known as billiard sports, are a wide variety of games of skill generally played with a cue stick which is used to strike billiard balls, moving them around a cloth-covered billiards table bounded by rubber .Historically, the umbrella term was billiards...
. The closer the ball finishes to the end wall, the higher the player's score
Score (gaming)
In games, score refers to an abstract quantity associated with a player or team. Score is usually measured in the abstract unit of points, and events in the game can raise or lower the score of different parties...
. In a tournament, players play a total of 15 games, each game consisting of 3 shots. Usually 5 games are played in succession, the winner being the player with the highest total of points.
Every player is placed in one of five classes according to his skill. Lower classes are sometimes given the advantage of extra points, so they can compete on an even basis with a player from a higher class. Clubs play against each other, and there is also a national championship
Championship
Championship is a term used in sport to refer to various forms of competition in which the aim is to decide which individual or team is the champion.- Title match system :...
every year. Since 1966, women also play too.
The method of hitting the ball is different for each player. Players generally crouch low and adopt a wide stance
Stance
Stance is a morpheme meaning stand, used in several ways:* to take a position in an argument, a stand on a given issue;* refers to a particular standing postureThere are also a wide variety of stances adopted in martial arts and sports:* boxing stances...
, with the hands quite far apart on the kliek. During the stroke, the head of the kliek never leaves the ground. It is of the utmost importance that the player keeps his body extremely still. No special clothing is worn, and players wear normal street shoes.
Kolf is often played with the accompaniment of jenever
Jenever
Jenever , is the juniper-flavored and strongly alcoholic traditional liquor of the Netherlands and Belgium, from which gin evolved...
or a cigar
Cigar
A cigar is a tightly-rolled bundle of dried and fermented tobacco that is ignited so that its smoke may be drawn into the mouth. Cigar tobacco is grown in significant quantities in Brazil, Cameroon, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines, and the Eastern...
. There are currently 31 club
Club
A club is an association of two or more people united by a common interest or goal. A service club, for example, exists for voluntary or charitable activities; there are clubs devoted to hobbies and sports, social activities clubs, political and religious clubs, and so forth.- History...
s and only 14 courses, compared with the hundreds which existed before. Of the courses still in use, all but one are in the tiny villages of Northern Holland. In the old days, they were invariably attached to cafés or social centres. Less than 1,000 people out of Holland’s population of 16 million, about 350 men and 250 women, play Kolf.
History
The ancestry of kolf reaches beyond reliable written records, though it is believed to be tied to the development of golfGolf
Golf is a precision club and ball sport, in which competing players use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a golf course using the fewest number of strokes....
. Documents as far back as the year 1200 mention four popular games involving both club and ball: chole in Belgium
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
and France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, jeu de mail
Jeu de mail
Jeu de mail or jeu de maille is a now-obsolete lawn game originating in the 15th century and mostly played in France, surviving in some locales into the 20th century...
in France, and beugelen and the klosbaan in Holland.
- Chole was probably the closest to modern golfGolfGolf is a precision club and ball sport, in which competing players use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a golf course using the fewest number of strokes....
. It was played with ironIronIron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...
-headed clubs and a wooden ball, and the aim was to reach a given target in the minimum number of strokes. - Jeu de mailJeu de mailJeu de mail or jeu de maille is a now-obsolete lawn game originating in the 15th century and mostly played in France, surviving in some locales into the 20th century...
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 provinceProvinceA province is a territorial unit, almost always an administrative division, within a country or state.-Etymology:The English word "province" is attested since about 1330 and derives from the 13th-century Old French "province," which itself comes from the Latin word "provincia," which referred to...
of LimburgLimburg (Netherlands)Limburg is the southernmost of the twelve provinces of the Netherlands. It is located in the southeastern part of the country and bordered by the province of Gelderland to the north, Germany to the east, Belgium to the south and part of the west, andthe Dutch province of North Brabant partly to...
.
In the interchange of fashion and trade, all these games tended to spill across to neighboring regions. Holland 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
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
, 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
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
, the colf craze seems to have travelled across the North Sea
North Sea
In the southwest, beyond the Straits of Dover, the North Sea becomes the English Channel connecting to the Atlantic Ocean. In the east, it connects to the Baltic Sea via the Skagerrak and Kattegat, narrow straits that separate Denmark from Norway and Sweden respectively...
to Holland's trading neighbour, Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
. While the Scots may claim to have invented the game of golf the evidence shows that the original idea was brought back by Scottish merchants to St Andrews
St Andrews
St Andrews is a university town and former royal burgh on the east coast of Fife in Scotland. The town is named after Saint Andrew the Apostle.St Andrews has a population of 16,680, making this the fifth largest settlement in Fife....
, in the county of Fife, from Hanseatic
Hanseatic League
The Hanseatic League was an economic alliance of trading cities and their merchant guilds that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe...
ports where colf was being played.
But oddly, while Scotland was developing golf as a spacious outdoor game, 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 cafés and inns. Increasingly, these 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 Holland, 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. But as kolf developed, a larger ball came into use, more suitable for the new form of the game, and the sticks became correspondingly heavier.
A major technical breakthrough came in 1830, when balls made of gutta-percha
Gutta-percha
Gutta-percha is a genus of tropical trees native to Southeast Asia and northern Australasia, from Taiwan south to the Malay Peninsula and east to the Solomon Islands. The same term is used to refer to an inelastic natural latex produced from the sap of these trees, particularly from the species...
, an early form of rubber, were introduced. These 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
Cycling
Cycling, also called bicycling or biking, is the use of bicycles for transport, recreation, or for sport. Persons engaged in cycling are cyclists or bicyclists...
, 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 Northern Holland. The one course found outside North Holland is in Utrecht
Utrecht (city)
Utrecht city and municipality is the capital and most populous city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, and is the fourth largest city of the Netherlands with a population of 312,634 on 1 Jan 2011.Utrecht's ancient city centre features...
, in the St. Eloyen Gasthuis (St. Eloy's Hospice
St. Eloy's Hospice
St. Eloy's Hospice is a Guild House in Utrecht in the Netherlands.Between the Dom tower and the Mariaplaats in Utrecht in The Netherlands there is a unique house that bears the name: St. Eloyen Gasthuis . The house has been occupied by the Smedengilde since 1440. According to documents preserved...
). This beautiful course is the oldest in the Netherlands, and although it bas been restored more than once, its history dates back to 1730. The Gasthuis (or old hospice
Hospice
Hospice is a type of care and a philosophy of care which focuses on the palliation of a terminally ill patient's symptoms.In the United States and Canada:*Gentiva Health Services, national provider of hospice and home health services...
) 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 which 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.
External links
- Rijksmuseum: Kolf (paintings)
- Ancient Golf: From Colf to KolfVirtual exibition Colf and Kolf