Three Ballbashers were emboldened enough to poke their noses out of their little hibernation dens this morning and finding it pleasant enough, pitched up to play golf. There was a light frost at the bottom of the hill but with no wind and some warmth from the sun, as long as you had not just returned from the West Cookham Indies you might have felt that Spring was at hand. The curious thing was that, for the secoind week running, we had the whole golf course virtually to ourselves.
The balls fell so that Bill and myself were partnered and Roger and RobA formed the other team. In deference to this being the first outing of 2025 for the other three, we decided that it would be both fun and a shorter walk to play off the green tees and both of those turned out to be true.
Freeman Inc have launched a new model Bill for 2025. As far as I could tell (and it would have been rude to ask) this did not involve a face-lift but there were serious changes under the skin. The new model has lost 22lbs over last year’s and appears to be programmed to play golf with a sunny disposition. The result of these changes was some excellent scoring which included contributing 6 x 3-pointers to the team score at important points.
As we all know, the course is undergoing serious reconstruction of the watering system, which today entailed a temporary green 130 yards short of the 4th green and closure of the 5th hole. Roger and Rob were not best pleased when I sunk a putt which travelled through the undergrowth, bobbling left and right, into the bucket which was the 4th hole for a 4 for 4 points. However it wasn’t long before Roger responded with a much more proper 4 for 4 points on the 7th hole. Bill got 5 for 3 on this hole to limit the damage and we were one point ahead. As we left the 7th, a small truck full of men in orange uniforms and balaclavas sped past and we briefly wondered if Temple was one of Hamas’s secret hideouts and that is what all of the tunnelling is about.
By this time I had lost count of the number of times that Rob had gone into bunkers but, since they are not a favourite of his, he developed a new strategy of getting his ball to jump over them. So often did he do this we coined a new term for this shot of Bunker Jumper. Roger and Rob were so pleased with this name that they decided to call themselves the Bunker Jumpers, despite the wishful thinking that that implies.
Also about now I discovered that the strange noises emanating from my striking the ball were not my vertebrae re-arranging themselves but rather the result of my golf ball having a large crack across the middle, possibly the result of me occasionally hitting the top half of the ball rathe than the middle. Disappointingly, switching to a ball in one piece made very little difference to my scoring but it did sound better.
Bill and I managed to take the front 9 by 18 to 15 but the second nine turned out to be a much tighter tussle and we arrived on the 18th tee all square on the back 9. We then all arrived within 5 feet of the pin in 3 shots. I was furthest away and sunk my putt to put some pressure on the Bunker Jumpers (Rob had failed to jump the bunker on the top left of the 18th fairway but still arrived 4 feet from the pin in 3). They rose to the occasion and sunk there’s with no problems at all so we all ended up with 3 points and a halved back 9.
Retiring to the clubhouse we met the newly lensed Alan, who seemed to be able to recognise us from a distance so that lens is working. Obviously we then spent the next 30 minutes talking about the ins and outs of cataract operations which is not a conversation for the squeamish but the results seem generally very positive.
Scores were as follows:
Bill and Richard 18 + 20 = 38
RobA and Roger 15 + 20 = 35
For the league:
Richard (34), Roger (32), Bill (31) and RobA (20)
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