Prosthetes at Winter Hill

For the 3rd edition of the Prosthetic Cup, Alan chose to take the team to Winter Hill where we found that, as long as you avoided going into the elephant grass just off the fairway and also into the bunkers where the tide had just gone out, it was an absolute pleasure to be there. The fairways, the greens and, of course the company could not have been better. We did n’t actually meet any members of that famous tribe lost in the Congo but it would not have been surprising had we done so.

Since the last running of the Prosthetic Cup several of the already qualified prosthetes had made doubly sure of their standing by adding at least one more lump of titanium into their body and the group comprising JohnH, JohnT, Bill and PeterR found that they had 9 such joints between them.

This was quite handy when it came to handicaps as Alan had come up with the novel and totally justifiable idea of adding 1 to a prosthete’s handicap per every artificial joint – this gave JohnT and Bill an extra 3 shots each and they both made good use of this benefit.

We had been expecting 12 BBs to appear but it transpired that, perhaps in an early attempt to qualify for next year’s Dementia Cup, Ashley (a newly qualified prosthete courtesy of his finger joint) and PeteF did not appear and quick phone calls established that they were not going to, and, moreover, had never intended to whatever the new BB Availability Chart might show. Never mind, we were 10 in number with 3 non-prosthetes and 7 prosthetes.

The 3 non-prosthetes were Nick, me and our guest Dominic Bostock, chiropractor to several of our number. Having Dominic there gave us extra encouragement to swing hard, knowing that any cracking or fizz-popping noises from our backs would soon be fixed. I suspect that, for his part, it was a form of market research. Anyway he has a WHS handicap of 3.1 and plays off 5 which puts him into a different constellation to the rest of the BBs and it was a real, but frightening, treat to watch him bomb a drive 290 yards down the fairway. The benefit of youthful vision enabled him to often pinpoint any wayward shots in the elephant grass which was also handy though his loaded question to Nick of “do you really want me to find that ball” after Nick had smashed his provisional miles down the centre was more than once answered incorrectly as finding the ball proved to be the easier part of the problem compared to hitting it back onto the fairway.

Us 3 non-prosthetes went off first and thereby were not able to see any of the efforts of the guys competing for the Cup. I managed to birdie the 2nd and 3rd holes which led me to the false conclusion that I could actually play the game and, as always, I was totally dis-abused of this conceit by the results on the following holes. Actually I am quite pleased not to be playing off 5 as I saw Dominic score countless pars which only gained him 2 points – it’s a hard school down there. He did reveal that he had a handicap of 9 at the age of 9 and has never been out of single figures since.

Whenever you are playing with Nick you are pretty well guaranteed of witnessing a champagne moment and we were not to be disappointed today. I have a feeling that it was on the Par 5 9th that Nick’s ball came to rest just off the fairway in the 1st cut of rough in a perfectly playable lie. The only snag was that there was a thin tree about 6 feet away directly in line with the pin which was still 250 yards away. Possibly working on the basis that the ball never normally went where he aimed it, Nick took a mighty swing with a fairway wood. The ball hit the tree plumb in the middle and for some reason it rose gently into the air about 15 feet, went back over Nick’s head and came to earth with noise of a ball hitting a golf bag which is exactly what it did. In fact it was sharing the slot in the bag allocated to Nick’s driver. Some discussion ensued as to whether or not you were penalised if the ball hit a tree first before hitting your own bag and the consensus was “probably” so the penalty was duly taken.

The denouement on the terrace was of course all about the Prosthetic Cup where it transpired that there had been a close finish but none-the-less John T had won it. The scores were:
JohnT (30), Bill (28), PeterR (27), Alan (26), JohnH (22), MikeW (21) and RobertM (20).

In keeping with the tone of the competition, we played 3 NP in 2 holes on 3 Par 3 holes. The balls were won by Richard, Dominic and John H.

The team results were:
Nick, Dominic and Richard 22 + 21 = 43
PeterR and Bill 18 + 21 = 39
JohnH and JohnT 17 + 20 = 37
Alan, Mike and RobM 17 + 22 = 39