Last updated on November 27, 2025
I am not referring to the several white flags on greens marking back pin positions but rather the White Flag of Shame i.e. the White Flag of Surrender and moreover, it was hoisted by a team of Ballbashers (please keep this to yourself – we do not wish to have a public besmirching of the honour of the BBs!). Of this more anon.
We were scheduled to play a Novelty game today with RobM organising it. It is a rock-solid guarantee that when RobM organises a Novelty game, it is bound to be very novel indeed and often quite complicated for Ballbasher brains to deal with, and today was no exception.
The main rules were that, on every hole, you had to play at least one shot with your feet together and one more shot with either your eyes closed, or one-handed, or standing on one leg. Stuart is the only Ballbasher that I know of who practices standing on one leg – presumably in readiness for days like today. Sadly Stuart was not playing today and those Ballbashers who were are generally speaking in need of a 3rd leg to help them maintain a vertical position. It is fair to say that I did not witness anyone attempting the one-legged shot. Failure to play the 2 acrobatic shots on any hole was to punished by a points reduction of 1 or 2 as appropriate.
A subsidiary set of rules also applied and gave the possibility of bonuses – a 1 putt par (an oozlum), or a par having hit a tree (a woodie), or a one putt par played out of a bunker (a ferret) or a no-putt par also played out of a bunker (a golden ferret) all carried a 1-shot bonus. When you think about it, a 2-putt par is more of an achievement than a 1-putt par in that you will have reached the green in regulation rather than had an obviously lucky wedge shot from somewhere way off the green. The bunkers were frozen hard so trying to play a bunker shot was like hitting reinforced concrete with a sledgehammer with equally unpredictable results – had the ball gone into the hole, it was likely that your fingers would have been rendered far too numb to pick it out.
I hope that you have grasped all of the above – if you have it’s better than most of us managed to do today.
Six turned out to play and the balls fell so that RobA, RobM, and myself formed one team and following us were Bill, MikeS and Roger. Two best scores per hole were to count for scoring.
RobM had introduced these rules on the 1st tee with the advice that playing with these bodily contortions was going to be good for our golf – bit like the Doctor telling you that the 3 bottles of prune juice per day that he had just prescribed were going to be very good for you.
It was immediately clear that RobM was going gung-ho for playing as many shots as possible with his feet tight together – if he had been in a buggy I thinkne might have been wearing shackles. Apparently this was going to correct his regular very strong draw (into the boondocks normally) off the tee. And he was proved correct – sadly he replaced the strong draw with a straight hit to the right but I dare say this was all part of the road to improvement.
RobA very rapidly discovered that putting with his eyes shut produced monumental improvements in his putting. I am sure that he would agree when I say that “rabbit in the car headlamps” is a reasonable metaphor for his confidence when putting from 4 feet from the hole. Putting with his eyes shut worked a treat and he was ramming balls straight into the hole with gay abandon. I guess that with his eyes shut he was no longer blinded by the car headlights.
After an early disastrous score-damaging attempt at a feet-together fairway wood shot I decided that it would be prudent to play these unnatural shots when on the green and , along with my partners, also found that putting with my eyes shut may no discernible difference to the outcome. The only snag was that leaving these acrobatics until I reached the green meant that more-than-once I found that although my ball was within the standard 64.5cm BB gimme distance, I had to eschew the pick-up and play the putt one-handed or blind – teh latter proving to be more reliable.
We continued on our happy way scoring just under 4 points per hole between us – not great but given the frost-bound conditions and the mental concentration required to recall if you had played a shot blind or standing on one leg, we were sort-of satisfied. It was on the 6th that RobA produced a true scoring bonus when, with 2 handicap shots on the hole, he reached the green in 3 having played a straight drive down the middle with his feet together. He then sunk the 8-footer with is eyes shut for a 1-putt par (oozlum in case you forgot) which resulted in a score of 5 points and that was added to RobM’s 5 for 3 points to give us 8 points on the hole.
Amazed by our genius, we then lost concentration and scored just 3 points on each of the remaining holes on the front 9 to give us 34 points in total at that stage.
It was while we were standing on the 9th tee that we received a phone call from the 3-ball behind us. I had forgotten to put my phone on silent and found it was Bill who had called so I phoned him back and received a plaintive plea that we play the Back 9 without any of the novel rules as they were not enjoying it at all. After a brief conference we accepted their unconditional surrender despite it being unheard of in BB games.
RobM continued to play his tee-shots with his feet together as he found that, generally speaking, the straight right gave a better outcome than the hook to the left. RobA forgot to keep his eyes closed while putting and miracles no longer occurred. But, in short, we didn’t score as well as we did on the front 9.
Once we had formally accepted the surrender of the other team in the clubhouse, we compared scores and understood why they had sent the plea:
Richard, RobA & RobM 34 + 32 = 66
Bill, MikeS & Roger 23 + 27 = 50
One huge benefit of having to concern ourselves with focussing on the fruits of RobM’s imagination was that, not once, did anyone mention Rachel from Accounts!
