JohnH challenged me to somehow create a link between what happened at Lords on Sunday and what happened at Wycombe Heights when the BBs came to play there today. Sadly I did not witness any questionable sportsmanship on the course and none of our members were physically abused on their way to the bar afterwards, which could be due to the fact that we have, so far, not admitted any colonial pom-gobblers into our ranks as yet. The closest we came to that today was when we were visited twice by the South African course marshal on our way round.
The first visit was when we, the 3rd group out comprising PeterR, JohnH and myself were standing on the 1st tee waiting to tee off. He came to give us stiff warnings about the difficulties which lay ahead, the course having been prepared for the club champs over the weekend, with the greens running very quickly at a Stimp Meter reading of 11 and the 1st cut of rough being hardly cut at all, and any visits to the the 2nd cut guaranteeing a lost ball – just the sort of encouragement that we needed.
Now the 1st hole is 364 yards long sliding away to the left. Heavens knows which member of the BBs he had been watching but he advised us not to tee off until the group in front of us had reached the green. Little did he know that Peter and John had already tee’d off and made at least 100 yards into the clump of trees on the left-hand side – as it happened the group in front of us would have been perfectly safe standing in the middle of the fairway 50 yards ahead.
He had performed one useful function in that he arrived back with Nick’s trolley on-board. Nick had decided after one hole that his intention to walk the Wycombe Himalayas had been a tad optimistic and he had joined JohnT in his buggy, thereby reducing the walkers to just JohnS and me. Frequently all 5 buggies were to be observed on the same hole.
The balls had fallen so that Nick, Mike W and John T formed the 1st group, Mike S, Bill and John S the 2nd group and we made the 3rd.
During the round we saw quite a lot of the 2nd group in the relatively near distance. They seemed to have developed a ball location theory based upon starting in the middle of the fairway and then driving the buggy round and round in ever-increasing circles until they ran over the ball. To be fair, as a methodology it must have worked out very well for them because they were the overall winners. But as the buggy circles around with ever-increasing diameter, the group behind (that was us) witness the buggy coming back towards us on every circle whether it was clockwise or anti-clockwise.
Just as we thought it was safe to tee off since the buggy was going away from us, round it would come heading straight back towards us. Somewhat similar to the Chinese water torture, this gradually inculcates a feeling of despair and, while it cannot be proven, we might like to argue that the result was the development by Peter of a savage hook off the tee. Personally I attribute my vast number of putts onto Circling Buggies Syndrome, though they, of course, might like to point a finger at my still-resident yips and my total inability to read the greens as the more likely cause.
I did manage to get round without losing a ball which was a minor triumph on its own but, along with Peter’s aforementioned hooks, my other playing partner, John H, spent so much time looking for balls in the very long grass that I am sure that he encountered members of that famous lost tribe of the Congo, whom I have fondly remembered in previous reports. Between the 3 of us we sort of scraped along failing to put any sort of decent team score on the board and sometimes grateful for a single point that one of our number had mustered.
A 2-ball gradually caught us up and we offered them the opportunity to play through us but when we warned them about the circling buggies they would then have to get past, they elected to stay behind and just play slower. From their mental health point of view, it was probably the best decision, and they did seem quite cheerful in the bar afterwards.
Peter R was finally rewarded by the golfing Gods with a magnificent straight drive down the 18th from where he scored a 4 for 3 points, backed up in typical fashion by John and I scoring blobs and we retired to the bar. I thought that the group in front of us. MikeS, Bill and JohnS might have been dizzy but they seemed OK and indeed their 31 + 33 = 64 beat Nick/MikeW/JohnT’s 27 + 36 to win the front 9 and overall. We scored 27 + 28 = 55 to come a distant 3rd and hand over all of our BashCoins.
The league scores were very mixed with MikeS(33) and Nick (32) streets ahead of the rest of us – Richard (26), Bill & JohnT (22), MikeW (19), PeterR (17), JohnS (15) and JohnH (13).
