Golf - Mulligan

[alisa]

Was Mulligan a really bad golfer that they named it after him?

[samclem]

JE Lighter American Slang shows the first printed use of the term as relates to golf in a 1949 cite.

He lists the term *Mulligan* as referring derisively about an Irish person as early as 1874, inferring that a mulligan was a stupid Irishman.

In a 1970 golf encyclopedia, he says *mulligan* is similar to a *shapiro*!

Not hard to extrapolate that giving an opponent a second shot after they blew the first one might come to have a derrogatory slang origin.