It was back down to earth with a bump yesterday for RobM and myself. Returning from sunny Portugal’s grassy fairways and glass-like greens. We were greeted by a heavy mist as we arrived at the Pro’s shop and it was clear that the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness was upon us – although missing for the entire day was any sign of mellow fruitfulness.
It was the first game of the new season and it was a Novelty game. Five turned up so we played the select 15 scores per 9 holes for the 3-ball and select 10 scorers for the 2-ball – the end totals to be divied by 3 and 2 respectively. The balls were thrown and fell so that RobM and I were partnered and following us would be MikeS, JohnS and Stuart who had bravely but correctly, as it transpired, turned out in shorts.
You might think that after our 3 rounds in Portugal Rob and I would have finely tuned games but you would be totally wrong. What followed was 18 holes of erratic, wayward and wasteful golf. When we reached the 8th tee we had 4 scores to select and only 4 scores to choose from 2 by 2. We managed to scrape 19 points for the front 9.
The back 9 was identical apart from a moment of confidence when we did not take a 2-pointer on the 14th believing that we needed to keep space for the 3-pointers that would follow but that never happened and we finished with 19 points once again and had to include two 1-pointers in our score on the last 2 holes.
Our opposition turned up in the clubhouse with same sorry tale of woe. Mike had some sort of excuse because he had a lesson in the optimistic belief that he could gain 50 yards on all of his iron shots. It seemed that the result was the complete reverse and we advised him to have another lesson to go back to where he was.
They too had scored identical scores on the front and back 9s. The scores turned out to be:
MikeS, JohnS and Stuart: 9.67 + 9.67 = 19.33
Richard and RobM: 9.5 + 9.5 = 19.00
If only we had taken the 2-pointer we had declined, Rob and I would have won the back 9 holes and overall as well. Mike said at least 3 times that he was flabbergasted that they had won and JohnS regarded it all as justification for his philosophy of taking every 2-point on offer on the basis that the last 30 years of golf have proved that 3-pointers are few and far between.
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