Another 1st for the Ballbashers today when RobA returned from a couple of weeks off golf having had a procedure to fix a case of Dupuytrens Contracture in his hand. Has anyone else ever heard of such an ailment? It does exist according to Google and anyway it’s much to complicated a name for a Ballbasher to make up. Alan, who zealously guards the entrance to the Prosthetic Cup competition, is going to have his work cut out trying to decide if it qualifies but I don’t think that it involves the insertion of any metal devices so it probably fails at the first hurdle.
Dupuytrens Contracture, or the fixing thereof, vastly improved Rob’s putting so I can imagine there will be several other Ballbashers heading to their preferred consultants to see if they have the problem as it will be easier to fix that than to fix their putting stroke.
We were at Huntswood today following Winter Hill finding that all of their buggies were being driven round their course by the young fry they are encouraging to play there. We all enjoy Huntswood so it was no problem. Seven Ballbashers turned out and we once again decided that the 3 walkers would play together and the 4 riding in two buggies would play as 2 pairs. So that put Alan, Rob and me out first followed by Bill & PeterR playing with Nick & JohnT. This followed a long debate on the 1st tee amongst the buggy riders as to whether or not they would pair up with the person they were sharing their buggy with or would they throw the balls into the air. Us 3 walkers had no interest in that debate so set off without hearing the end of it.
We amused ourselves for the first couple of holes by talking about the finer points of Emma Raducanu and also about her tennis. The resultant daydream of being 50 years younger over-shadowed any concerns with the take-back or follow-through of our golf swings and we got off to a high-scoring start as a team. After 5 holes I had 15 points and was imagining that I might get the maximum 27 on the front 9 but then we remembered the English football team and I only added 5 on the next 4 holes. However we meshed well and had 25 points on the front 9 which we were sure was easily winning. Had we known what the guys behind us were scoring, we would not have been quite so cocky.
The occasional fine rain shower passed over us but the ball was running really well on the fairways – a thinned 7-iron of Rob’s went the best part of 150 yards which was fine except that he only wanted it to go 130 yards. Alan had scored 18 points to my 20 on the front 9 and he went on a scoring spree of four 3-pointers in a row on the back 9 which got my attention – at least our competition was good for the team score. Rob was also knocking in the 3-pointers courtesy of a contracted dupuytrens or some such.
We retired happily to the clubhouse where we enjoyed mammoth club sandwiches or similar and compared our scores. It turned out that Bill, whose Dupuytrens was as yet untouched, had also enjoyed a splendid day on the course with his highest score for possibly a decade and the scores were all very tight:
Team Scores
Alan, Richard and RobA 25 + 23 = 48
PeterR and Bill 24 + 19 = 43
Nick and JohnT 19 + 21 = 40
League Scores:
Richard (39), Alan and Bill (38), Nick (33), PeterR and RobA (31) and JohnT (28)
Nick went off home looking forward to making swingeing cuts to the pot-hunters’ handicaps prior to the Sand Bucket next week!
