Which is more difficult: a 250 yard par three, or a 260 yard par four? Almost all golfers would say the long par three: one of the great joys of short par fours is a realistic opportunity for those of even average ability to card a precious birdie.

Suppose, though, that we are talking about the same hole. Does a hole become noticeably harder or easier for the addition or subtraction of a few yards? Of course not. But because par is such a blunt instrument – it only deals in whole strokes – the long par three is likely to be seen by many golfers as an extremely difficult hole, while, if extended to a short four, it would be viewed as easy.

This is seen most obviously in championship golf, where, because TV scores tournaments in relation to par, reducing the par of a course is a quick and easy way for organisers to make their events seem more difficult. It is pretty amazing that an artificial construct should, because of its admitted usefulness in comparing the scoring of golfers who are at different stages of their rounds, have achieved such status.

It’s not just at championship level, though, that par’s seductive charm influences how we think about courses. Take the Red course at the Berkshire in England, a masterpiece of design by Herbert Fowler. The Red was famously laid out to have six holes of each par; it still has, but in today’s golfing world several of the par fives are relatively short, and thus ‘easy’. Consequently, the course itself is perceived as easy. But if the club decided to reprint the scorecard,designating three or four of those six par fives as fours, would it be any easier? It’s nuts to say that it would. Even in handicapping terms, par is only an approximate guide: UK courses use standard scratch to set handicaps, and in countries that have adopted the USGA’s handicapping system, the course rating and slope calculation often comes up with numbers that are only tangentially related to par.

But perhaps par’s worst influence comes in the development of new courses. Somehow, from somewhere, a perception has emerged that only courses of par 72 –and often with two threes and two fives in each nine – are ‘real’ courses. This sounds crazy, but any golf architect who has worked in developing markets will tell you how prevalent it is. Forcing architects to create holes of a particular par in locations where the ideal design might call for something different, purely to satisfy some nebulous concept of a standard, cannot make for good golf design. One golf architect told me that in his twenty year career in the industry, he had never built a course that was not par 72. Developers in emerging markets, he said, had a deep-seated belief that a par lower than 72 indicated the golf course was somehow lesser.

So would we gain anything by cutting ourselves free of the tyranny of par? The answer is probably moot: the concept is too deeply ingrained in golfers’ minds for us to break away from it entirely. Even the few older courses that did not assign par figures to holes – Swinley Forest in England is the most famous example – have abandoned their fight, though there are a few ‘purist’ courses elsewhere in the world that resist. But if we could just convince ourselves that while score might bemeasured in terms of par, difficulty is not, we might achieve something