As we stood on the 1st tee at Temple and gazed down the white slopes to the green at the bottom with the sun glinting on the frost, it was so obviously the perfect day for skiing. None of the 8 of us having come equipped for alpine pursuits, we had to settle for golf and with the ground as hard as iron, it was clearly going to be an absolute lottery when the ball bounced. Of course sometimes the bounce is favourable and your ball leaps out of a bunker under its volition – somehow you are inclined to forget those lucky bounces and focus more on the titanic leap to the left that your ball took when encountering major hazards such as worm-casts.
There were a princely 8 of us out for the second round of the aptly-named Frostbite League and the balls fell so that PeterR was partnered with MikeW and Alan with JohnT and they made up the first 4-ball. Following on behind were Stuart & Bill and Mike S & myself.
Everybody bar one had come equipped with a yellow ball for ease of location in white wastes. The one who had not was Bill who had decided that a dull dirty pink was the appropriate colour. After we spent 5 minutes looking for this ball on the 1st hole while almost standing on it, I loaned Bill a yellow ball and we speeded up, well, went less slowly would be more appropriate. I am sure that if I would care to go and look harder in the bushes up by the 12th tee, I might be able to redeem my loan, but sometimes life is too short.
There are two approaches to playing on rock-hard golf courses. My favourite is akin to the Scottish method of playing golf which is to run the ball along the ground whereby you hope that the average of random bounces left and right is straight ahead. Stuart, on the other hand, prefers the mighty airborne wallop whereby you fly the ball over as much ground as you can before it lands from a vast height whereby you indulge in the lottery of the vast bounce forwards, sideways or backwards.
It would seem that you can use either approach equally well as we both arrived at the halfway point with 16 points each. On the team side of things, our partners had been struggling or else just not getting the rub of the green or the bunker and after 9 holes Mike and I had slender lead of 18 to 17. Of course we had no idea what was going on ahead though we were encouraged by the sight of JohnT’s buggy describing ever-decreasing circles while he looked for his ball.
Stuart was by now fully committed to his airborne route and most of his drives were things of great beauty though there was no way that Mike or I would pay such a compliment until we finished playing – in any case Stuart would have assumed that we were being sarcastic. His thing of beauty on the 10th actually ran down into the crater and came to rest about 5 feet from the pin. We breathed a sigh of relief when he missed the birdie putt. Mike’s ball had taken such a leap to the left that he was almost playing his 2nd from Marlow High St. so he could be forgiven for the blob that ensued, at any rate he scored a great 3 points on the 11th to put us back in the lead.
Bill had been lulling his opponents into a false sense of security with 8 blobs on the first 13 holes and then sprung the trap with 3 points out of nowhere on the 14th when the best that Mike and I could do was 1 point apiece. And so we reached the 18th tee all square on the back 9. Stuart then launched the last of his rocket-drives which came to rest about 40 yards from the green while his partner took the overland route there but they both scored 3 points. Although I managed the par it was only worth 2 points and so they won the back 9 by the same margin as we won the front – it was All Square.
Any self-satisfaction we derived from our scores was very swiftly despatched by PeterR and MikeW who had matched our 18 on the way out, but then, courtesy of a tremendous run of 5 straight 3-pointers from the 11th hole onwards by Mike, had scored a ridiculous 23 points on the back 9 to win that and the overall match. When I have worked up the courage, I will ask him if he favoured the high or low approach because whatever it was, it clearly worked.
They finished with 41 in total which beat our group’s 36’s and Alan & JohnT’s 31.
MikeW also won the league game with his 35, followed by Stuart with 34, me with 32 and the others with less.
We now have to wish Mike well with his knee replacement surgery due on Monday – he is thereby likely to miss the rest of the Frostbite games unless we are in for a very hard winter indeed!
