Golf is a good walk spoiled.

An anonymous quip of the 1890s. Quote Investigator’s earliest find is the London Morning Leader of 29 December 1897, where it already appears in quotation marks: a game of golf is a ‘good walk spoiled’. In 1899 a Sydney paper credited it to the jockey Sam Loates; in 1903 the tennis writer H. S. Scrivener gave ‘to play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk’ to ‘my good friends the Allens’; in 1904 the American novelist Harry Leon Wilson was quoted with a longer form. The first credit to Twain found is in the Saturday Evening Post of August 1948, repeated by Reader’s Digest that December, nearly forty years after his death.

Probably the best-known joke about golf, nearly always credited to Twain. Not in any of the fifteen Twain texts in the sources (none of them mentions golf), and the editor of The Quotable Mark Twain (1998), R. Kent Rasmussen, judged that Twain ‘probably never uttered’ it.

Golf ruins what would otherwise be a pleasant walk.

• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. (not found) Oscar Wilde
• No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one. (misattributed) Elbert Hubbard
• A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back again when it begins to rain. (not found) Robert Frost
• Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. Oscar Wilde
• Two intelligent people cannot fall in love; true love needs one idiot. (not found) Fyodor Dostoevsky

• quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/28/golf-good-walk
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain

“Golf is a good walk spoiled.” Attributed to Mark Twain. No. It is not in Twain’s works, and who first wrote it is not known. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/golf-is-a-good-walk-spoiled/ (checked 20 October 2026).

Have a different wording, or a source we missed? Check it or submit it.

Do you hold the rights to anything on this page? Tell us.