With three of us available to play at Temple on Wednesday we decided that we were sufficiently quorate to play a Summer League game especially as we had one of the organisers, Rob, in our midst.
The day was marked by the return of Stuart to competitive (well slightly competitive) Ballbasher golf. In order to avoid problems with muscle spasms in his back, Stuart had decided to reduce the arc of his backswing from approximate 360 degrees to about 359 degrees and coupled with an increase in languidity he started to resemble Alan and enjoyed the same results – amazing distance with no apparent effort.
Rob was still using his surgical appliance as a tee and that worked very well as well. Unfortunately he was not allowed to use this for every other shot.
The highlight of Rob’s round occurred on the Par 3 5th where he was the only one of the three of us to put his tee-shot on the green. One of the green-keeping staff was adjacent to the 5th tee and complimented Rob on his achievement, at which point Stuart commented in a slightly sarcastic tone “wait to you see his putting!”. Stung by the implication, Rob immediately sunk his 15 footer for a birdie and 4 points which tripled his score.
For my part I was striking the ball quite well but inevitably failing to convert good positions into good scores. For example I managed to reach the Par 5 12th green in 3 shots but then proceeded to take 4 putts with 3 of them being from inside 2 feet.
With limited competition from Rob and I, Stuart disappeared into the distance score-wise and finished with 36 points including 6 pars, versus my 30 points and Rob’s 24 points. We did manage to get round in 3hrs and 5minutes and had Temple virtually to ourselves – we surmised that the rest of the population was taking cool showers and lying in a dark room to prepare for the football.
There was no doubt that Stuart is back golf-wise – Sand Bucketers beware!
