In golfing terms should Ambrose be upper- or lowercase?

Question

Is the Ambrose type of play named after someone and therefore uppercase?

Answer 1

I think the issue of capitalization of eponyms is inherently ambiguous, e.g. you can perform a herculean task, but you might get Parkinson's disease. The general trend seems to be that you capitalize the eponym, but not it's auxiliary words (like disease above) or words derived from the eponym. Further, capitalization wanes after the eponym comes into common use. Ambrose is a little bit of a tricky case, since it is commonly used, but relatively recent, and only used within a particular subset of the English-speaking world. I would think that this places it pretty squarely in Do Capitalize territory.

If it really bothers you, you can always skirt the issue by calling it a scramble.

Answer 2

A quick Google search reveals:

• It is evidently named after someone (a couple, apparently)
• It is written using upper-case, except on Wikipedia

Answer 3

It would be with an uppercase A because it is a name. (Ambrose)