A Great Day to play golf

Eight Ballbashers turned out on a quite beautiful morning at Temple for our second eclectic game of the season to be met with stunning views of verdant fairways surrounded by swathes of equally verdant meadow rough packed full of charming white & yellow flowers. An extraordinarily pretty sight that, judging by the “back to nature” designs that dominated the prizes at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, would have been in with a serious chance if someone had encapsulated it into one of their display gardens.

However, unlike Chelsea where any deviation from its manicured areas is likely to leave you in close proximity to a Pimms tent, we were soon to discover that any deviation from Temple’s manicured fairways was likely leave you in a far less satisfying situation: the benign looking first cuts were, in reality, deceptively difficult to get the ball up & out of and, worse still, the deeper rough was full of golf ball coloured flowers, making finding any errant shot a matter of considerable luck. Conditions that, one would think, were ill-suited to the gung-ho, let’s smash the ball as far as possible tactics engendered by an eclectic, where most Ballbashers are trying to post as many 3 and 4 point holes as possible regardless of the dangers surrounding them.

Unsurprisingly, the first group, composed of the two teams of Mike W & John S and John H & Nick, soon encountered difficulties, scoring a combined total of 3 points on the 1^st with two players failing to score due to “ball finding” problems in the flower strewn rough. However, despite this less than stunning start, Mike W quickly posted two 3 pointers on the 2^nd & 3^rd holes followed by John H, back from almost 6 months of not playing golf, posting two 4 pointers on the 6^th & 7^th followed by a 3 pointer on the 8^th – a truly impressive run and one which, as his team partner, I was very grateful for.

Meanwhile, the second group, comprising Stuart & Rob and Bill & Alan, performed much better on the 1^st before following John H’s lead to pick up large numbers of points on the 6^th, 7^th & 8^th. And, from then on, the scorecards suggest that, as it should be with an eclectic, neither group was too bothered with incurring “blobs” (of which there were many) in their pursuit of those important 3 & 4 pointers (of which there were even more).

As we know, individual Stableford scores are pretty irrelevant in this format, particularly at this stage in the competition, so I’ll concentrate on the 3 & 4 pointers, which were as follows:

1. Stuart & Rob – 27 points (Stuart 4 x 3 pointers + Rob 5 x 3 pointers)
2. Alan & Bill – 23 (Alan 1 x 4 pointer and 2 x 3 pointers + Bill 1 x 4 pointer and 3 x 3 pointers)
3. John H & Nick – 20 (John H 2 x 4 pointers and 1 x 3 pointer + Nick 3 x 3 pointers)
4. Mike W & John S – 15 (Mike W 4 x 3 pointers + John S 1 x 3 pointer).

And, for the Bashcoins, Stuart & Rob won the full 18 holes with their 27 points while John H & Nick won the front 9 with 17 points and Stuart & Rob won the back 9 with 15 points. All of which, for those of us with no inclination or reason to work these things out, represents a 36% increase on the average number of 3 & 4 pointers per player achieved in the first eclectic game – i.e. a pretty good performance all round.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, there were few other newsworthy incidents apart from a universal feeling that it had been a great day to play golf and an equally universal desire to wish Roger a very speedy recovery. 

Nick