Last updated on May 21, 2021
I am not alluding to the very stylish jeans sported at the apres-golf bar by the ex-President, Chairman, CEO and Captain of Temple aka Stuart (jeans are now permitted under Temple GC bylaw 42 (a) (i) (according to Stuart)) but rather to the foolish optimists amongst us sporting shorts and short-sleeve tops. This group included myself who was fooled by the temperature at midday on the back patio at home into thinking that Spring may have properly arrived and changed out of long trousers and long sleeves before setting out for Temple only to spend the afternoon feeling chilly at best.
At least we did not have to endure the heavy hail shower which apparently fell on Cookham during our absence.
Anyway I digress from the golf which is exactly what my drive did on the 1st hole – it digressed as far as the 12th fairway which I found to be a tactical improvement over last week when I only digressed as far as the trees en-route to the 12th fairway and was thereby not afforded the option over going over the said trees and enjoyed various wooden collisions before emerging. Not so this week when I sailed over the trees onto the back of the green from where I took the regulation 3 putts.
My playing partners were Alan and Bill and we were following MikeW, Roger and JohnS at a respectful distance and being likewise followed by Nick, MikeS and Rob. Given the plethora of confusing messages about the tee-time allocations, it said something about the Ballbashers ability to cope with chaos that 9 players made it to the tee. The only one missing was PeteF who had a prior appointment with a cement mixer in Marlow. His absence, however sad, did enable us to play as 3 teams of 3 with the 2 best scores on each hole to count which did away with the usual Ballbasher mental arithmetic problems trying to work out 3/4 of their handicap let alone deal with the trying task of adding 1 to the result.
This Ballbasher ability to survive (as well as cause) chaos is totally in evidence when it comes to dealing with the WHS handicap system. After doing our very best to find out exactly how it should be used when scoring blobs or super-blobs on holes (an unfortunate characteristic of BB golf) and failing in that quest, we have decided pragmatically to revert to the BB handicap system for now while still allowing enthusiastic members to submit scores into the WHS random number generator. The DisHon Handicapping Sec will be issuing further exciting notes on this subject.
As for today’s golf I have to say that I ran into a touch of decent form. The highlight was hitting my Longest Drive more-or-less into the garden of the Compleat Angler, which I deemed to be fairway for the purpose of awarding the prize, and thereby causing Roger to make some caustic comments about Ladies Tees as I removed his name from the LD list.
The lowlight occurred on the Par 3 10th where Alan and I both put our drives just short of the crater, we both dropped wedge shots to about 5 feet from the hole and we both then took 3 putts to finish the hole. My 2nd putt did hit the metal contraption which is supposed to help you retrieve the ball from the hole but also does a very good job of repelling the ball as it is made of very springy metal. Alan had this theory that it should be placed at 90° to the direction of travel but following this incident we decided that he was 90° out in his estimate.
I think it’s Ashley who delights in advising you that your problem might be that you are standing too close to the golf ball …………. after you have hit it. To be fair this was Bill’s affliction for the first 9 holes but once we worked out that he was also standing too close to the ball before he hit it as well, cheery times returned on the golf course and the team result performance improved dramatically to gain a share of the back 9 Bashcoins.
The team scores were:
MikeS, Nick and Rob 38 + 37 = 75
JohnS, MikeW and Roger 37 + 36 = 73
Alan, Bill and Richard 32 + 37 = 69
Spring Cup scores were:
Richard (36) (winning on countback), MikeW (36), Roger (34), Rob (32), MikeS and Nick (28), Alan (27), JohnS (25) and Bill (17).
LD and NP in 2 – Richard.
NP – MikeW
