The 1st group out at Temple today comprising Stuart, Rob and Bill managed to complete their round in 3hrs and 15minutes – that’s right 3 HOURS AND 15 MINUTES. And this was on a day when the wind blew strongly from the south-west. And this was on the first day of the new BB WHS handicapping system when putt gimmee distances were greatly reduced. This has set a new record for a BB 3-ball which will be entered into a new page on the website. I will circulate the methods used to achieve this speed as soon as I have retrieved them from the team in question.
The group behind them comprised Nick, JohnH and MikeW and they also did well but finished up a hole behind despite being reduced to a 2-ball when Mike completed his ration of 9 holes without a buggy. Buggies were banned today following the heavy downpours last night with the result that MikeS could not even start his round. I had withdrawn before the start with a knee problem as well and Mike S and I joined the BBs at the 19th hole to catch up on the morning’s results.
We had a report of Mike W’s blatant gamesmanship on the 1st hole when, with Player A in mid-swing, he conjured up Player B from nowhere thus causing Player A/B’s driver to pass within an electron’s width of the force-field of the ball on the tee and gently knock it off. Otherwise most of the talk was about the number of BBs who had been to see Mr Morgan about their knees.
The calculation was that 8 out of 15 had made this journey or were scheduled so to do – just slightly over 50%. We felt it might be appropriate to ask for the 10th one to be free in return for Honorary BB Membership. Luckily the number of artificial knees only stands at 25% of the 30 possible. The talk then, as always, meandered into more obscure statistics such as the number of carpal tunnel operations in the group but luckily stopped short of potentially more personally embarrassing issues.
Nick and I had wondered how the new WHS handicap indices might play out and were gratified that the team result was a tie between the 2 teams on 39 points each – always a good sign that the handicaps are reasonably accurate and also requiring no BashCoin to change hands.
Stuart won the 1st league game with 36 points followed by Rob (32), JohnH (30), Nick (28), Bill (25) and MikeW (17 off 9 holes only).
Everyone was very happy that no rain had fallen on the golfers despite the forecast – a good omen for the rest of the Autumnal programme hopefully.
