Yes, oh joy, we played almost the entire round at Wycombe Heights Par 3 in a steady light to medium drizzle in a temperature not quite high enough for the shorts we were all sporting but on grass which was showing signs of turning green. We were playing in the inaugural competition for the Par 3 Cup and jolly good fun was had by all.
The Par 3 course is not kept in the condition that the PGA would demand for such an illustrious competition but the greens were for the most part slick and being generally quite small and mostly on a serious slant, they offered the sort of challenge that would definitely outwit most PGA professionals used to something totally different but us coarse golfers felt totally at home navigating our way round the sort of damage that only a badger can do.
We were playing off mats which were virtually impossible to penetrate with a tee-peg and Bill’s cunning thought of putting the tee-peg ahead of the mat on the nearest grass was greeted with serious dis-approval by MikeS led to Bill and myself taking at least 5 minutes on the 1st tee finding someway to keep ball and tee vertical long enough to hit it. Perhaps we were supposed to play it off the mats without a tee but that always runs the risk of jarring your whole body when you hit the mat and not the ball. We needed Alan’s little hammer that he carries in the winter having experienced years of rock-hard greens in Scottish winters.
Standing on the tee of yet another 80 yard hole you feel like you could almost reach out and drop the ball in the hole but somehow it wasn’t until the 4th hole that our team of Bill, Stuart and myself managed to put a tee shot onto the green. A good strategy would have been always to hit the ball onto the rough on the high side of the green from where it would trickle down to the edge but it’s OK to have a strategy but it’s something very different when you have to execute it and as often or not we would hit the ball short or on the downside from where it seemed perfectly possible for the ball to roll down to the A40.
Our opposition was JohnS, MikeS and PeterR and, for the first several holes, whenever we turned round to look, their balls seemed to be nicely on the green and appearances weren’t deceiving because JohnS scored a 2 for 5 points on the 5th hole and PeterR got another one for them on the back 9. The closest we came to such exalted heights was an opportunity for Bill on the 16th but the result was a relatively meagre 4 points.
The team scoring was based on adding all of the scores on each hole except on the 9th and 18th where all the scores were to be multiplied together. This does present the opportunity for one of the 3 scores to be zero thereby making the team score zero. They were nowhere near that possibility and scored 36 points on the 9th and 18 on the SI = 12 18th hole where JohnS’s handicap of 30 gave him a 4 for 3 points. So they scored 54 points on these 2 holes which somewhat overpowered our 30. But even if we had done better on those holes it would not have been enough to defeat them as they gave us a thorough beating.
Team Scores:
JohnS, MikeS & Peter: 92 + 77 = 169 (taking all the BashCoins)
Bill, Richard & Stuart: 72 + 66 = 138
For the Par 3 Cup:
JohnS (49), PeterR (45), Stuart & Richard (42), Bill & MikeS (39).
We retired to the clubhouse in a jolly frame of mind where I treated everyone to a drink to celebrate my very recent birthday. We enjoyed the sandwiches but were somewhat puzzled by the pricing strategy whereby a sandwich with a starting price of £4.95 would by dint of a decision to have the eat-in version which came with additional crisps and some water-cress and a further decision to have chips rather than crisps ended up being priced at £11.02????? Never mind, the serving wenches were quite jolly and so were we as we wondered why we hadn’t pursued a career as a football player’s agent taking a hefty % out of the enormous transfer fees currently being paid.
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