Golf questions, answered without the jargon

Why most of these pages have no product picks

Every page in this section answers one question and then points you at the guide that does the choosing. Most of them carry no product recommendations at all, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight.

Two reasons. The first is that a reader who arrived wanting to know which hand a golf glove goes on should get that answer, not a product grid with the answer buried in paragraph six. The second is that it lets these pages compete on being the best answer to the question rather than the best-monetized one.

The exception is a handful of questions where the question is the purchase decision — hard case or soft cover, this Garmin or that one, how many clubs a beginner actually needs. Those pages still answer first and still explain what to look for; the short list of products sits underneath, after the explanation rather than instead of it. Everywhere else the commercial pages are one click away and clearly signposted at the bottom of the guide.

The newest of those exceptions are the budget questions and the ones with a persona attached: how much to spend on a golf bag, what a home simulator actually costs, which rangefinder suits unsteady hands and best golf watch for women. Two more stay bare on purpose: how to wrap a golf club has no product answer at all, and are golf lessons a good gift carries only the two things worth wrapping alongside a certificate.

The 2026-10-17 additions are mostly maintenance and logistics questions, and five of the six carry picks because the answer resolves to an object: how to clean golf clubs, how many golf towels you need, how to store golf clubs, whether you can take clubs on a plane, whether an indoor putting green is worth it and how to use alignment sticks.

The newest page is the maintenance job nobody writes down: how to clean a golf bag. It carries picks for the same reason the others do, and it makes one point worth reading even if you never touch a bag again - the problem with a golf bag is moisture rather than dirt, so the drying step is the one that decides whether the smell comes back. It is also the best gift-research opportunity on the site, because an emptied bag answers the glove hand, the glove size, the ball model and whether they walk or ride.

Where to start if you don't play golf

Two pages do most of the work. The golf gift buying guide walks through the four questions that narrow any golf gift down to two or three real options, and golf gift mistakes to avoid covers the five errors that are completely invisible unless you play — the glove hand being the one that catches most people.

After that, the guides split by category. Gloves have four, because gloves are cheap, constantly needed and the easiest golf gift to make accidentally unusable. Balls have two, covering the one spec that matters and how many to actually buy. Rangefinders have two, including the rules question that decides which model to get.

The jargon you'll run into

Golf has an unusually dense vocabulary and most of it is unnecessary for a gift buyer. The four terms that genuinely come up:

• Compression — how much a golf ball squashes when hit. Lower is softer and suits slower swings. Explained here.
• Slope — a rangefinder feature that adjusts for uphill and downhill. Not permitted in competition, which matters when choosing one.
• Spikeless — golf shoes that grip through a molded sole rather than removable cleats. Wearable off the course.
• Stand bag vs cart bag — whether the bag has fold-out legs for carrying or a flat base for riding. They are not interchangeable.

How we write these

We don't test golf equipment and don't claim to. Factual claims here come from manufacturers' published specifications or from the USGA's published Rules of Golf, and both are cited at the bottom of each page. Where something is a judgment rather than a fact, we say so.

The full method, including how the live pricing works, is on how we pick.