It was RobertM’s much anticipated first go at organising a Novelty game today. We did anticipate something coming from the left field but definitely under-estimated Robert’s capacity for thinking out of the box. His scheme involved the ability to score additional Stableford bonus points for achieving any of the following:
Oozlum – par with only one putt – 1 point
Woodie – par having hit at least 1 tree – 2 points
Sandy par – par having been in a bunker – 3 points
Ferret – holing out from off the green – 4 points
Golden ferret – holing out from a bunker – 5 points
Alan, being recently returned from a soujourn in the USA, was imbued with the Californian spirit of anything is achievable if you set out to do so, and checked in advance of tee’ing off that if he was to cannon off a tree into a bunker and from there hole out for a par on a hole on which his handicap entitled him to 2 shots, that his total score would be 4 + 2 (Woodie) + 5 (Golden Ferret) = 11. This was confirmed as correct and I rather assumed that Alan would spend most of his round following in the footsteps of Don Quixote trying to achieve his Golden Wooden Ferret. Of this more anon.
The Oozlum Bird is well-known in Australian circles for his habit of flying in ever-decreasing circles until he disappears up his own fundament. This feels to me similar to a lot of BB golf which is why I guess that Robert close it. Today we also played the format Choose 10 (2-ball) or 15 (3-ball) scores per each 9 holes which is where each team starts off with huge optimism planning only to choose 3 or 4-pointers and usually ends up despondently realising that they have to include the final blob on the 9th or 18th hole to complete their 10 or 15 scores.
The balls fell so that Alan, MikeW and PeterR were a 3-ball tee’ing off first followed by Bill and myself accompanied by Nick and RobM.
I put my second shot on the 1st hole into the greenside bunker on the left and immediately realised that this was an opportunity for a Golden Ferret or even a Sandy Par at the very least – of course neither was achieved but instead my partner Bill notched an Oozlum for 5 points. By golly, we both thought, this is an excellent format and so very easy. Bill, himself, was easily on cloud 9 perhaps cloud 10 which proved to be quite handy in sustaining us through the stream of 1 and zero pointers which now followed.
Things got so bad that when we both scored 1 point on the 6th we realised that we had to take them. Our immediate opponents were playing better than us posting 2 or 3 points per hole and on the 6th hole, while Nick scored 3 points, Robert bagged an Oozlum for 5 points and they took 8 on the hole. In such fashion they scored 27 to our 20 on the front 9.
The back 9 proved fairly uneventful until we reached the 14th at which point Nick attempted to drive his buggy alongside the green and fell victim to the geofencing system whereby the buggy is constrained to go only in reverse. This led to Nick reversing further and further into a dense laurel bush. Eventually we managed to push him back out of it which hopefully entertained the 3-ball behind us who had had to wait while we sorted this out. He came quite close to emulating the Oozlum Bird but doing it in a buggy carried no bonus points.
Robert bagged his second Oozlum on the 16th thereby giving him a brace which are no doubt now hanging in his pantry. Bill followed suit on the 18th with a 4 for 4 including the bonus thereby neatly topping and tailing his round which is always good for the morale. En-route Robert had entertained us on the 17th – he had ensured that I noticed that his 3rd shot had come to rest about 12 inches off the green for he had every intention of sinking his 25 yard putt for a Ferret. He decided to pace out the putt and closely inspect the borrows lying along his 25 yards and, having done so, he marched over to Bill’s ball in the middle of the green and lined himself up to play that one instead, until we pointed out his error (??????!!!!!!).
We eventually caught up with the 3-ball on the terrace who were by now well into their pudding course. The scores had to be adjusted to account for them being a 3-ball and us being 2-balls hence the decimal points. It turned out that the 3-ball had not scored a single Oozlum, Woodie or Ferret or any combination thereof and they seemed to regard these as matters of disdain rather than achievement, having racked up sufficient normal 3 and 4-pointers to win most of the BashCoins without any dubious bonuses.
I suspect that Alan’s spoken thought of an 11 point Golden Wooden Ferret was designed to make his opposition take unnecessary risks by deliberately playing off trees in the hope of the ball landing in a greenside bunker in the even vainer hope of holing out while he, himself, went steadily on his way down the middle of the fairway playing regulation golf!
The scores were:
Alan, MikeW and Peter 12.33 + 13 = 25.33
Nick and RobM 13.5 + 9.5 = 24.00
Bill and Richard 10 + 12.5 = 22.50
Oozlums :
Bill (2) and Robert (2)
No form of Ferret, Golden or Wooden, was scored by anyone.
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