MikeS, Bill, JohnS and myself arrived at Temple still in a great state of excitement having stayed up way past our normal Ovaltine time on Sunday evening to watch the final round of the Masters. We were all sad for Rose who has been runner-up on at least 3 occasions and who is easily the closest to us in age terms, but also delighted that we do not have to put up with any more of the same endless waffle on the subject of will Rory complete the Grand Slam this year or not.
We were also excited to imagine that we might emulate some of Rory’s play as we too have tons of experience of trying to extract our balls from unplayable positions, albeit generally speaking without quite the same success that he enjoys. We soon discovered that the practice green was running nearly as quickly as they must have been at Augusta and were not entirely sure that this high level of simulation was totally welcome but we threw the balls which put Mike and Bill as one team and JohnS and myself as the other.
The wind was blowing quite strongly from behind us on the 1st tee which helped us send some quite presentable drives down the fairway. As always any drift to the right was rewarded with a second shot to be played out of the trees and this is where Bill found himself with the first opportunity to emulate a Rory-eque escape.
He was about a foot away from a large tree trunk with his view to the green about 170 yards away impacted by over-hanging branches. I missed his shot as I went in search of my ball and was then quite surprised to see a ball on the green about 10 feet from the pin. Thinking that it must have got there from a wild slice off the 12th tee, I was then totally amazed to see Bill walking happily down towards the green. Mike and I also put our second shots onto the green from much simpler positions but ended up further from the hole. Bill then put his putt stone dead for 4 points and thereby clocked one positive Rory.
I then took 4 putts from about 15 feet, sailing backwards and forwards past the hole each time and clocked 1 point and one negative Rory. By the time we came off the 18th I had accumulated 9 holes on which I had taken 3 or more putts and was fed up to the back teeth with my Rory emulations. In the meantime Bill had racked up another 4-pointer on the 8th by putting his ball very gently off the top of the slope down onto the green and the sinking a difficult 5-footer.
Despite a couple of pars from me and a 4-pointer from JohnS we arrived on the 9th tee with MikeS and Bill one point up. After 3 quite good shots I was on the green pin-high and 6 feet away. Mike was in the bunker and Bill was more-or-less in the hedge below the green with a totally restricted back-lift. After much discussion they decided that Bill would attempt to putt out to a bit of flat’ish grass – he failed to do that but ended up on the path where he got a free drop onto where he was trying to go in the first place. from there he chipped up onto the green and sunk a 9-footer for 2 points thereby getting his 3rd positive Rory. I then took 3 putts from 6 feet to score one point and get my 4th negative Rory. As a result Mike and Bill won the front 9 by 2 points.
Mike had eschewed all of this escapist nonsense and had scored a steady 18 point versus my totally erratic 17 and Bill and John’s 14 each.
The back 9 continued in the same vein. Mike put his drive into the crater on the 10th hole – he was at the very far end and the pin was at the front but none-the-less he made the par while I took another 3 putts – by this time I thought I would be better off swapping my putter for a bath sponge attached to the end of a bamboo and I am still working on that idea.
JohnS failed in his attempt to score a positive Rory from under the trees on the right-hand side of the 16th. He got a couple of bits right – he used an 8-iron and tried to hold it wide open and hit it at 190mph. Something was n’t quite right and he went 3 feet forward. He then repeated this twice more before giving up – perhaps it was his 30mph rather than 190mph?
On the 18th Mike racked up another Rory when his drive went down the hill on the right towards Marlow and his second shot almost finished on the practice green from where a gentle trickle down onto the green and an 8-foot putt scored 3 points. In the meantime I had reached the green in a straightforward fashion and taken another 3 putts for 2 points.
Mike had added another steady 18 points to his score for 36 to comfortably win the Spring Cup. Bill had easily won the Rory competition with 4 positive Rories while John and I had amassed something close to 11 negatives.
Spring Cup scores: MikeS (36), Richard (30), Bill (26) and JohnS (25)
Team scores:
Mike and Bill: 22 + 20 = 42
JohnS and Richard: 20 + 16 = 36
LD (6th): Richard
NPin2 (8th): Bill
NPin2 (18th): Richard
Be First to Comment