Golf questions, answered without the jargon

Why 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. None of them carries its own product recommendations, 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 commercial pages are one click away and clearly signposted at the bottom of every guide. That's the right place for them.

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.