Amnesia at Temple

Yes, I don’t like to say it, but we seemed to have the first witnessed case of amnesia amongst the Ballbashers at Harleyford today and the problem is that we do not know which of the 2 Ballbashers involved, suffered a TAA – a Transient Amnesiacal Attack.

Seven Ballbashers gathered at Temple in the mist/fog on an utterly freezing morning to play the 4th round of the Frostbite League and never has it been so aptly named, apart, perhaps, then the time aeons ago when MikeS, Tony Brown and I attempted to play in 3 inches of snow at Maidenhead. Of the seven Ballbashers, four were in buggies and this did not include any of the recent joint replacement team.

A few balls were thrown and Alan was partnered with Peter R, playing with Bill and myself and following on were the 3-ball of Nick, Roger and JohnT. We were also accompanied by Steve Duncombe who is recovering from a nasty frozen shoulder and came for a walk-round. He had agreed to act as Alan’s caddie which was extraordinarily brave. He was even seen to be cleaning one of Alan’s clubs before we started off – I presume that he was too embarrassed to be associated with them in their pre-clean state. As far as I know Steve had specified a fairly modest 10% of Alan’s winnings as his fee. Alan had replied that since that was likely to be 10% of FA, he could charge what he liked which only goes to show that you need to think more carefully before making such casual throw-away remarks.

Before we teed off, I maintain that Nick quite sensibly suggested to me that it would be sensible to drop out from any bunkers we found ourselves in as it was very likely that they would be frozen solid and the best outcome from trying to play out of them would be a broken wrist. I maintain that I agreed that this was an excellent suggestion and we then applied it in our group. Of this, more later.

We stood on the 1st tee looking at a complete fog bank ahead of us. A pair of other golfers had set out ahead of us but we deemed that, unless they had frozen to death, they should be long gone. And if they had frozen to death, they would not mind the odd ball pinging off them. Multiple eyes were trained on the direction the golf balls were travelling in as they left the first tee and amazingly enough, we actually found all 4 – as always the search area was easily limited to the area of the trees on the right.

As we progressed through frost and fog, it turned out that having Steve along brought multiple benefits. He was a 5th pair of eyes when it came to spotting the golf balls en-route and then finding them when they had finished. He occasionally carried Alan’s clubs when he left them somewhere inconvenient. He moved Bill’s trolley around the back of the 14th green and so on.

As seems to be the case on these frosty mornings, the shots we produced ranged from brilliant to horrendous. In line with our “No Dawdling” campaign, Bill had cut out all of his practice swings and I would definitely say that his chipping in particular was a million miles better. The one that he produced from some distance right of the Par 3 8th green was a work of art which got our team 3 points. If I had only sunk one of the innumerable putts that came to rest a couple of inches either side of the hole, Bill and I would not have lost the front 9 to Peter and Alan by 18 to 17.

The sun had broken through when we were playing the 7th hole but the cold air had all gathered by the 9th green and we were lucky to get away from there with all of our fingers intact. Roger claimed afterwards that other bits were in danger of falling off as well. We did n’t actually see any brass monkeys but it woudl have been easy top miss them in the fog.

We finally completed our round in a very satisfactory 4 hrs and 5 minutes and the 3-ball finished in the same time right behind us. So the No Dawdling campaign got off to an excellent start – particularly given the time we had to spend looking for our balls in the fog.

Over another excellent Temple lunch, we exchanged experiences and Nick remarked that it was very difficult to play out of the bunkers to which we replied that we had adopted his excellent pre-game suggestion of dropping out. He steadfastly denied having put this idea to me which left us both puzzling over whose memory was defective.

The team scores were
Peter and Alan 18 + 20 = 38 (winning all of the BashCoins minus Steve’s 10%)
Richard and Bill 17 + 18 = 35
Nick, Roger and JT 17 + 16 = 33

The league scores were:
Richard (30), Peter (29), Alan (28), Nick (26), JohnT (24), Bill (23) and Roger (20) – all very close as usual.

Hopefully next week will bring more sun and less freezing fog!