Jeremy:
If you really want to see how par became the baseline for handicapping and as such first led things astray the article on the history of par by Knuth will show it!
When Doleman came up with the idea of "par" and asked Davie Strath and Jamie Anderson to tell him what they thought the reasonable "par" score would be at that competition at Prestwick, what did they tell him? They told him they thought "par" would be 49 (for the 12 hole course at Preswick)!
But what kind of competiton was that tournament at Prestwick which Old Tom Morris won? It was a stroke play tournament!!
And then Doleman quickly did something that was really misleading! He took that gross score "expectation" and he began to break it down into an "expectation" for various individual holes to try to determine what their "par" was. That's basically where the concept of par 3s, 4s and 5s came into being!
And that's fine but what Doleman forgot to do is recommend then that for MATCH PLAY handicap purposes a single round gross score posting will never do! The reason it won't is because that's the stroke play format and not the match play format!
To apply par to a match play format the individual holes need to be considered separately and that was never done and still isn't! The only way to do that is to post HOLE by HOLE, but that rarely, if ever happens, even today!
But we can see that the handicapping authorities of both Europe and the USA never paid that problem any heed and they still haven't. But no one can say they were never warned!
There's a really excellent article in this regard, again, by the thoughtful Max Behr. (I should get GeoffShace to post it in the "In My Opinion" section).
You will see the danger of what I'm saying here and the danger that Behr was outlining in this regard when he said in his article on the problems of handicapping in 1930;
"Because it involves the reduction of activity to some dead mathematical formula, the giving of handicaps has always been a difficult problem to solve. In golf this difficulty is further accentuated in the failure to perceive that a round of golf is not a continous performance such as a race, it's divided into 18 separate parts. Therefore, our present method of averaging scores to attain a handicap has been working from a Whole to arrive at a standard for the Parts, instead of intelligently working from the Parts to determine the efficiency of the Whole. And as it is a conclusive fact that 99 percent of golf is played at match play, a better method would be to arrive at a player's average effectiveness in the 18 separate matches. This is in no way revealed by averaging his best total scores for a ROUND."
And so we can see that a single ROUND score can in no way EVER work efficiently to determine a match play handicap! A single round score is the STROKE play format only. Hole by hole scores are the MATCH play format only!!