Yesterday it was time for the final Summer League 2025 game. At the start of the day four players had the possibility of winning – Alan, MikeS, MikeW and myself. MikeW scuppered his chances by not turning out to play leaving the three of us to battle it out – whoever won on the day would win the League whatever else happened.
At the start of the day there were seven BBs signed up but, similar to the hapless green bottles, we ended up with five. One of the drop-outs was Nick and he sent a text explaining his absence and when I passed this news onto the others, Peter, who had turned up to explain that he was n’t going out to play, wondered who this Queasy person was who Nick had woken up feeling and who thereby caused him to drop out of golf presumably making offers that we had absolutely no inclination of attempting to match.
After seriously undermining our confidence on the glass table-top they call the putting green we headed for the 1st tee and, on throwing the golf balls, discovered that MikeS and I would set off as a pair followed by Alan, Bill and RobM. At least I had one of the competition where I could see him.
I initially thought that Mike’s first drive which went right at 45 ° to the desired direction was a cunning trick to lull me into a false sense of security but, when his second tee-shot went left at 45 ° to the desired direction and his third tee-shot went right at 45 ° to the desired direction and his fourth tee-shot sailed left at 45 ° to the desired direction right over the top of the trees bordering the 4th fairway, I became confused by the extraordinary complexity of his tactics.
By the time we came off the 4th green I was leading him by 10 points to 3 and Mike was explaining his colossal loss of form as being due to the fact that he hadn’t played golf for 2 weeks and he had forgotten which way up to hold the clubs. He now worked this out and scored 3 points on each of the next 2 holes which was, at least, handy for us as a team. Despite the odd drop of rain in the last couple of days, Temple still resembled a concrete wasteland on which we had no control over where the ball actually finished on the tilting fairways but we did gain distance when we sporadically hit the ball in the right direction – I have no idea how that balances out but after 9 holes I had 22 points so it cannot be too bad.
At this point Mike had 13 and he worked out that, if he scored one more point than I did on every hole on the back 9 , then he would catch me up and maybe there would be a bonus point somewhere along the way and he would beat me by one point and win the League depending on how Alan was faring behind us.
Sure enough, on 4 out of the 5 next holes he did indeed outscore me by one point and I was really starting to admire the audacity of his strategy – it’s like when the favourite in the Derby hangs around at the back of the field before surging up the rails to win. Unfortunately, on this occasion the surge did not materialise and despite Mike’s unlikely 3 points on the 18th from the right-hand-side boondocks we ended up with 15 points apiece on the back 9.
We were joined by PeteF for lunch in the clubhouse and he seems to be progressing as well as could be expected from his replacement knee op. The denouement revealed a dead heat in the team game with no BashCoins changing hands:
Alan, Bill and RobM 20 + 23 = 43
MikeS and Richard 23 + 20 = 43
The individual results for the League were also close:
Richard (37), Alan (34), RobM (33), Bill (29) and MikeS (28).
The Summer League Shield was therefore retained by myself at the cost of a handicap reduction which was not good news as we head towards the end of season trophies.
