Incredibly the rain stopped raining early enough for the powers-that-be at Temple to allow us out onto the whole course including real greens. Sadly the thought of the possible damage from slaloming buggies kept them on the banned list and so Bill had to pull out.
That left 4 of us to be paired off on the first tee – MikeS played with RobM and Alan played with me. As always we left the first tee wondering why the greenkeepers bother to cut the first fairway as 3 of us went down the left-hand side into various bits of boondock and the odd one out went for the trees on the right-hand side as his preferred option. As a result of this waywardness we left the 1st green with the regulation one point per team.
The second hole revealed to me the burden that I had to carry for the rest of the round apart from on the 11th and then until we reached the 18th. Despite being the only player on the green in 3 shots, I came off with a 7 for a blob due to an uncontrollable urge to hit any putt way past the hole. I don’t know why I was doing that – it hadn’t happened on the practice green – thus reinforcing my long-held belief that using the practice green is a total waste of time.
After wading through the mud down the 3rd where you have to leave your trollies about 150 yards ahead of the tee which caused Rob some extra exercise when his drive only went 100 yards, matters improved on the 4th where Rob and I both scored pars. Mine was due to my pitch shot finishing stone dead thereby avoiding the gorilla-putting problem. Alan then had the joy of scoring 4 points on the 6th against their 3 and, although my drive on the 8th was last seen heading towards Henley down the A4130, Alan and I stood on the 9th tee with a handy 2 point lead which we held onto on the 9th.
By now the mist had lifted and a glimmer of sunshine started to dry out the mud so it was possible but not often that the ball might run a bit down the fairway without resembling a giant mud-ball when you caught up with it. This helped on the 11th where I managed to at last hit a putt only just hard enough for it to fall into the hole with its’ last gasp thereby scoring 4 for 3 points – the wind was taken out of my sails by RobM scoring a 5 for 3 points but I was happy none-the-less.
My sails were then completely taken aback by taking 3 shots to even reach the fairway on the 12th and at least 3 putts from 6 feet on the 15th and despite my partner Alan’s valiant 3 points on the uphill 13th we were losing ground against Mike and Rob, the latter of whom, completely against previous form, sunk long putts on the 17th and the 18th to give them a 3 point victory on the back 9 and a 1 point victory overall 39 to 38.
The tight team finish was reflected in the individual Frostbite League results:
RobM & Richard (30), Alan and MikeS (27)
We retired into the clubhouse and there found Bill who proceeded to give us a complete guide to the workings of the USA College Fraternity system – I won’t bother you with the details since you would need a Classics degree to make any sense of it, but I do recall Bill being a member of Qai Psy or something similar – the most important navigational skill in this area was to understand which of the Sororities focussed on Greek standards of beauty and female emancipation when it came to recruiting their members.
