Nietzche fails at Temple

I suspect that I am the only Ballbasher foolish enough to study physics at university and therefore perhaps the only Ballbasher who had to take a course in Scientific German. Some of you will be aware that rather than create a whole new word for a new discovery, the Germans prefer to just plug a whole series of words together in one long string to describe the new discovery. That way they have ended up with roughly 80,000 words in their vocabulary while we have 160,000. For example, a driver was probably referred to as der langestokmitdemfettekopfe when it first appeared. The trick for passing exams was to have a dictionary with very clear alphabetic division so you could look up all the parts of the word at high speed.

However none of this minimally remembered knowledge equipped me to totally understand Bill when I met him in the car park at Temple first thing yesterday and he explained to me that his task on the day was to deliver schadenfreude to his team-mate. Not Clement (which might have at least been comical), or Lucien (which might have been frightening), or Sigmund (which would have been enlightening), but Schaden it was going to be. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with german philosophy, schaden-freude is the generous act of performing in such a way that others around you are allowed a smirk or even a gloat – of which more anon.

As the four of us stood on the 1st tee with a cold wind blowing from the North straight into our faces, it immediately seemed as though the French version of freude i.e. froid, was much more appropriate. Given Bill’s ambition, I was perhaps marginally unfortunate to be teamed with him in competition with MikeW and JohnT who had absolutely no intention of allowing any gloating from us to occur.

Bill’s opening attempt at delivering his promise was to zig-zag down the first fairway from one side to other without ever coming to rest on the 50 yard-wide fairway but at this early stage in proceedings, no gloating was perceived from the opposition mainly, I suspect, because we tied the score.

Observing that he had not achieved his objective thus far, Bill then produced, over the following holes, the full bag of tricks designed to awake the s-f tendency in any normal golfer. And I did detect a fleeting glimpse of a gloat from Mike when he observed that his 5 on the 7th entitled him to 3 points while mine only got me 2. Bill then decided on the downhill Par 3 8th to take a different tack and scored 3 for 4 points which would have given me some s-f fun had it not been for JohnT also scoring 3 for 4 points on the same hole. S-f was dashed from my lips and any thought of it was banished by them winning the front 9 by 22 points to 19. They are of course gentlemen and gentlemen never gloat.

That is until we finished the 11th when Mike was able to repeat the trick of scoring 3 points for his 5 strokes while I only got 2 for my 5.

We were not actually being allowed a lot of time to enjoy any s-f because Mike had determined that we were going to keep ahead of the 4-ball behind us who comprised 2 pairs of long hitters in 2 buggies. Sometimes we had one of our number despatched to the next tee to tee off while a 4th member was still finishing his putt on the previous green! Such speed did at least keep the French-froid at bay and you will be amazed to learn that we did at least achieve our objective (they will not pass us) and finished our round in 3hrs 45mins which was not bad, given Bill’s intention to maximise the s-f amongst us.

Mike and JohnT wrapped up the back 9 by 22 points to 18 and thereby the overall match by 44 to 37 – I would n’t like to say that I detected any s-f in anybody as we thanked each other for the game but they were keen to know precisely how many Bashcoins they would be winning. Either way, trying to maximise the ambient schaden-freude did not seem to work out for the best for our team – this time at any rate.

We retired to the warmth of the bar where we met Rob A who had intended to play but who had sustained a knee injury playing tennis. John and I then enjoyed hearing how much Mike (and Rob and Bill) had enjoyed their trips to Costa Rica which does seem to offer the life-style and philosophy that we would all love – it would seem to provide us with the maximum possibility of fulltime s-f at the expense of the rest of the world!

Some useful tips on how to maximise our airmiles emerged but they did seem to rely on building a new house.

The Frostbite League scores were Mike (36), Richard (32), JohnT (30) and Bill (s-f).