From our correspondent:
“Whether playing golf in dry summer conditions is a good or bad thing is debatable. On the one hand the ball travels a country mile, making even half-hearted shots or mishits look impressive, on the other hand a well hit shot will often take advantage of any slope on the fairway to run off it into the surrounding, difficult to get out of summer rough.
Temple today was in super dry condition, in fact I’ve never seen it so dry, leading to some wonderfully long drives and fairway woods that made hitting a green in “regulation” a distinct possibility on an unusually high number of holes, but also to some very frustrating end results as you watched a seemingly perfectly executed shot come to a sticky end.
In other words, scoring was, inevitably, going to be highly erratic. Made the more so by having to play off the Green Tees as the normal tees were receiving heavy doses of recuperative sand. And, as we know, the Green Tees are often in very unusual positions compared to the Yellow tees and… the stroke indexing on quite a few of them seems to defy golfing logic.
Odd… and, to stir things up even more, the novelty game rules we decided on were equally unusual: i.e. the same as we use for team scores in the Eclectic League (i.e. only 3 points or more on a hole to count per player) even though it wasn’t an Eclectic game.
Pop all of this into the mix and then see what happens… as they say.
Well, what happened was as follows. Team 1 (Mike S, Roger & Robert M) posted a reasonably consistent 22 points on the front nine and 18 points on the back nine, giving them a total of 40 points. Team 2 (Peter R & Pete F) posted an equally impressive 21 points on the front nine followed by just 10 points on the back nine, giving them a total of 31 points. And, Team 3 (John T & Nick) posted a not so impressive 15 points on the front nine and a match winning 29 points on the back nine, giving them a total of 44 points.
The number of tales of well hit shots being “unfairly” penalised by the conditions, and of rather average shots somehow ending up in par scoring positions, were too numerous to recount but everyone seemed to have a fun time on this most unusual of novelty golf days.”
