It was a day full of surprises – JohnH appeared for his second game of golf this year and later on RobM revealed that his London office had been a short hop for a fit bunny to Hefner’s establishment in Mayfair apropos of which I cannot recall.
It was the final game in the Summer League and 7 turned out to play including the two contenders for the League trophy – MikeW & myself, either of whom had to win on the day to win the league. After some confusion over the allocation of buggies which actually saw the majority of players in a buggy, the balls were thrown and MikeS, Nick and myself formed one team accompanied by JohnH who felt that he would be much more relaxed following his lack of practice and potentially injury-effected shoulder, if he was not to be part of a team.
The other 3-ball comprised Bill, MikeW and RobM. MikeW had acquired a new driver following the demise of his previous club when returning from Ireland last week. His new version seemed amazingly light and appeared to be set at a very professional loft of 9º. Despite this his drive on the 1st soared miles upwards before finally coming to rest where all drives come to rest – in the trees on the right-hand side. After his round he took the driver into the Pro’s shop and discovered that he had bought a Lady’s club and immediately set about changing it for one of the right gender to save any possible embarrassment.
Despite the real pleasure of playing off the green stuff for the first time for weeks along with the ball not running off every fairway, our 3-ball really struggled to get any points onto our team score. Nick racked up four zeroes on the 1st four holes and MikeS had serious struggles getting out of any bunkers which was most unlike his normal self. Nick was stopping his downswing just before he hit the ball with random results until MikeS gave him some Arnold Palmer-originated advice to “stand up straight and just hit the ball”. This had very beneficial results for his tee shots just leaving him short of some similar guidance on the 2nd, 3rd etc shots needed to reach the hole.
My own problem was a failure to get the ball airborne – but although the grass was returning, the ground was still quite hard with the result that, if I hit the ball in the right direction, it would travel a satisfactory distance one foot off the ground. On the uphill Par 3 13th I enjoyed the perfect result from this “method” of play when my grubber of a tee shot travelled all the way up the hill onto the green and came to rest 4 feet from the pin from where I sunk the putt for 4 points.
We pulled ourselves together on the back 9 and all three of us improved on our front 9 score to some extent. Nick strung 4 shots together on the 14th for another team 4-pointer and all of us scored 3 points on the 15th – not good meshing when only two scores were counted but good for team morale.
JohnH had, as always, shown that he can really move the ball when he hits it and hadn’t experienced any shoulder problems – we did wonder if we could substitute some of his scores for ours but suspected that the opposition would not have agreed to that. His drive onto the 1st green described opposite gave him some real pleasure even if it was from the wrong direction.
Afterwards in the clubhouse the conversation somehow got moved onto gambling during which Bill revealed a mis-spent period in his student life when he regularly went to Vegas testing out a professor’s system for winning at blackjack and RobM revealed that he had developed a system for improving the odds on the roulette table which had resulted in a bunny taking a close interest, sadly as it turned out, only in what he was up to and not in what he would like to get up to. Some BBs admitted that they had never gambled other than the weekly 3 BashCoins on our golf outcome. We had tee’d off later than normal so this discussion took place over a table crowded with tea-pots, tea-cakes and other such delights.
The team scores turned out to be not very close:
MikeS, Nick & Richard: 33 +38 = 71
Bill, MikeW & RobM 28 + 33 = 61
The individual scores were:
Richard (37), MikeS (27), MikeW (26), JohnH (25), RobM (23), Nick (20) and Bill (17)
The result being that Richard retained the Summer League Trophy.
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