Buoyed by the forecast for dry weather, which turned out to be accurate, six BBs turned out to play in the penultimate round of the Frostbite League at Temple today and some amazingly high scoring ensued. Luckily we are not yet in the season for handicap adjustments else the DisHon Sec (Handicapping) would be sharpening his red pencil in a frisson of masochistic pleasure.
All 18 greens were closed for winter treatment involving a lot of sand and we knew that we had to play on temporary greens but being creatures of, perhaps misplaced, habit several of our number had some completely irrelevant practice on the putting green before we set off – they would have made more productive use of their time if they had practiced in the car park.
The balls fell so that MikeS, Bill and I were teamed up and MikeW, PeterR and RobM formed the other team. We set off first and I hit the longest, straightest drive that I have ever hit down the 1st fairway onto the flat bit at the bottom. This turned out to be a mistake because I spent the remaining 17 holes trying to replicate it and failing.
However a bigger puzzle turned out to be, for us at least, how to putt on the “greens”. The holes were actually double the normal size so we could not blame them and, for the most part, the grass around them was shorter than the rough – one exception being the 9th where it was difficult to spot the hole for the daisies. Whatever the cause, our team managed to hit the ball short, long or over-allowed for the borrow and contrived to throw away many a good scoring opportunity on our way round the 18 holes. It’s not that we scored badly but we travelled with a definite feeling that we needed to be doing a tad better given the makeup of the 3-ball behind us.
We actually had the whole course to ourselves as far as we could see with only a remote 2-ball for company – so apart from the challenge of the daisies it was millionaire’s golf. Bill was much more cheerful last week, partially due to the fact that 6 recent sporting games had turned out exactly how he wanted them to – Arsenal beat Brentford (just), Man City drew with Liverpool, England at last played some interesting rugby and won, Italy beat Scotland (don’t know why Bill has it in for Scotland – did they invade Hawaii at some time?), Arsenal beat Oporto (just) and I think that Hawaii must have beaten Tahiti in the world hula-hula championships ( I have witnessed this event and have never thought about coconut shells in the same way since).
We also had the clubhouse to ourselves which meant that the absent Nick missed an opportunity to have the whole sponge cake to himself. A couple of our number had the omelette option which in one case turned out to be excellent but in the other case, perhaps because it took 10 minutes longer to arrive, had the constituency of old leather shoe soles. The rest of us stayed on the safer piste of tuna and bacon salads etc.
The denouement revealed some excellent scoring:
MikeW, PeterR and RobM 46 + 42 = 88 (winning all of the BashCoins)
MikeS, Bill and Richard 41 + 41 = 82
For the Frostbite League (which is now a 4-horse race with 1 game left to play)
PeterR and MikeW (42), MikeS and Richard (39), RobM (36) and Bill (24)
From his score, it looks like RobM has now reached the final chapters of his Inner Game of Tennis book – clearly Self 1 was, for the most part, in command of his game today – let’s hope he never makes it to the index.
