If that sounds like positive news, it wasn’t – we are talking Stableford points, not gross scores!
On the plus side, we enjoyed weather which almost felt like Spring was round the corner even though 4 layers was, for the most part, required to keep out the wind. Also, although we expected to be playing on 18 temporary greens, we actually played on 18 fully restored greens which, while sandy, were very quick and true – too quick for some of us, me in particular.
Als on the plus side, Nick re-joined us after 4 months hibernation and, though clearly a tad rusty, managed to conquer a couple of clubs.
The balls were thrown and MikeW and myself set off into the woods on the right-hand side playing with Roger and RobM who favoured the left-hand side of the 1st fairway. Behind us the buggy cavalry contained Nick partnered with PeterR and MikeS partnered with Bill.
MikeW and I both had difficulties extracting ourselves from the woods and that finished up with both of us scoring blobs on the 1st hole. I always find that starting with a blob puts me immediately under pressure to score a couple of pars to make up for the loss, and that, in turn, does not improve my golf and, once again this nasty spiral turned out to be the case.
The only person in our group who scored well on the front 9 was RobM. He told his partner Roger that his secret was to empty his mind completely while addressing the ball. In the case of Rob I find that difficult to imagine – I could envisage that using some derivative of Chaos Theory, he may be able to cause the trillions of neurons buzzing round in his fertile brain to briefly neutralise each other.
Roger attempted to do the same but in emptying his brain, he also threw out anything to do with his golf swing, and the results could best be described as a failure. However, being a man who likes to see things through, he decided to attempt to fill his brain only with thoughts of the barmaid and the result of that strategy was a spectacular shot up the hill onto the top tier of the 11th green 12 inches from the hole.
There is a valid argument that, since we keep on attempting to play golf, there must already be quite a lot of vacant space between our ears.
As a group, we all then attempted to fill our brains with either vacant space or the sort of things that motivate teenage boys, with varied amounts of success. MikeW and I managed to mesh quite well on the back 9 which may have been due to the fact that our brains are often fairly inactive. Our immediate opponents who had trounced us on the Front 9 ran into problems with their thought processes – I have no idea where Roger’s had got to by now while Rob’s neurons had gone off on a path of their own choosing.
Back in the clubhouse, we discovered Stuart, who had recently returned from South Africa, plus Nick and Bill who had decided that 12 holes was a sufficient number to play.
The team scores transpire to be:
MikeW & Richard 15 + 23 = 38
Roger & RobM 18 + 15 = 33
MikeS & Bill 14 + 12 = 26 (MikeS played the Back 9 on his own)
Nick & PeterR 16 + 10 = 26 (Peter played the back 9 on his own)
The individual scores were:
MikeW (29), MikeS (26), Peter & Richard & RobM (25), Roger (20), Nick (8) and Bill (5)
MikeW now has a very firm hand on the Frostbite League with only MikeS in with a faint chance of beating him.
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