In the end, for a variety of reasons, we became a 4-ball at Harleyford on Wednesday which did at least have the benefit of being able to see the whites (bloodshot or otherwise) of the opposition’s eyes. JohnT and I took on the Arsenal-supporting duo of Alan and Bill in a straight Better Ball Stableford competition.
Alan and I decided to use the game as an opportunity to put in another WHS card. Having now got a better handle on the workings of the system I realised that my next 2 rounds would wipe out 2 extremely good rounds from my last 20 and, as a result, my WHS handicap would go up faster than a SpaceX. So I set off with the two contradictory objectives of hammering the opposition while not scoring well enough to damage my WHS handicap objective.
The successful outcome would of course depend on the opposition not playing their very best golf and, in this regard, I was not to be disappointed. John and I had not decided on a particular football team to align with, but, for some reason unknown to me, I have a Chelsea Football Club ball marker in my possession, and I used this at every available opportunity to mark Alan’s ball thus causing a distracting irritation.
Alan was swinging as languidly as only Alan can – any attempt by the thrashers amongst us to emulate the slow pendulum of his stroke allows about 25 contradictory thoughts to enter the brain during the slow-motion backswing with completely unpredictable results in the direction, elevation and speed of the ball off the tee. For what it is worth, I managed to capture a video of this swing of beauty which is in the new Coach’s Tips section of this site.
Our front 9 contained very little of merit to report. Only Bill managed to score 3 points on a hole – the Par 3 third hole as it happened. By dint of scoring an evenly shared 2 points on every hole, John and I managed to reach 18 which beat their very erratic 15. We were fortunate in that Alan’s metronomic tee-shots were being followed by somewhat less-than-metronomic second shots.
On the 11th hole I discovered my very old 5-wood lurking in my bag and, luckily, it decided to demonstrate to me that I had been totally stupid to ignore it and the result of that discovery was that I scored 6 pars on the back 9. Fortunately the scores on the other 3 holes were bad enough to ensure that I was able to complete my second objective of the day and I was pleased to see that overnight my handicap index had gone up by 0.6 – in the past this would have taken 6 demoralisingly bad games to achieve over something like 3 months of qualifying games at Harleyford.
This run of good form was sufficient to see off the Arsenal boys and we finished happily discussing back injuries, and the relevance of various therapies and swing shapes to deal with them, over a drink on the patio. It actually felt as though life was nearly back to normal.
