Yes 12 Ballbashers appeared at Temple for yesterday’s Novelty Game – the only members missing were Rob who is still knocking back the Cuba Libres prone on his sunbed in Florida, John S who rarely plays within 8 weeks either side of the shortest day, Robert who is recuperating from his hernia op and Ashley who is waiting for his finger op – all relatively acceptable excuses in the BBs Book of Excuses.
They came gung-ho for a round with 3 clubs and a putter. Mike W had found a pencil golf bag lurking at the back of his garage and once he had removed the dead vermin, found that, not only did he not need a buggy, but that he could carry his clubs for the entire round. Much to my surprise, all proved that they could count up to 3 and nobody tried to sneak in a sand wedge on the side.
With 12 players, we were split easily into 3 teams of 4 with 3 buggies and I got round the usual problem with throwing the balls up when everyone has a sudden loss of memory when it comes to identifying whose ball is whose, by everybody drawing lots except Bill who was tad delayed by having to arrange for a plumber to come and fix his heating before Lynne would allow him out of the door. Happily he arrived just in time for his team’s tee-off.
To add a a frisson of tension to what otherwise would have been a very relaxing round, the team score on each hole was to be determined by multiplying the best 3 scores together. Even the BBs without O-Level Maths soon worked out that if they had two scores of zero in their group of 4, then, regardless of whether or not the other two members of the group had both scored birdies for 4 points each, their resultant team score would be 4 x 4 x 0 = 0 (zero!). In our team this led to an unwholesome rush to take a putt to avoid being left as the last person to putt, on whose shoulders some massive team score rested.
A member of the first team out – Alan, MikeW, JohnT and PeteF – was subsequently of the opinion that the multiplication factor was unfair for them as they had one of their number with currently-damaged eyesight who was seeing a large number of holes on every green. Other teams could, perhaps uncharitably, not see any problem with this at all because it must have increased the odds that his ball would fall into one hole or another. It is possible that Team 1’s feelings about this issue were coloured by their scoring 5 blobs in their 18 holes which was at least 4 blobs more than the two other teams.
In our team which comprised Stuart, PeterR, JohnH and myself, the reduced selection of clubs seemed to have quite beneficial effects. Peter’s choice of club to tee off with resulted in him developing an amazing straight drive with just the right amount of draw. His tee-shot on the downhill 8th totally eschewed the normal cop-out approach of hitting the tee-shot over to the left and hoping that the hill would pull it down onto the green, by flighting a ball with draw just inside the right-hand bunker to finish 5 feet from the hole. The net result of his play was that he scored 19 points on the front 9.
It will be interesting to see on Monday at the JFGS if Ballbashers appear carrying just a couple of clubs – I suspect not as it will feel almost like one of those interesting dreams when you are inappropriately naked somewhere (I can’t remember who mentioned that to me).
Stuart scored 18 by totally steady play and John and I were not far behind. My score was slightly dented by a tendency to go into bunkers when I was not carrying a sand-iron in my selection. I found that using a 9-iron had totally unpredictable results with one such shot on the 8th hitting the flag-stick with such force that the ball disappeared in the direction of Temple.
By the time we had played 8 holes, we found that we had scored a completely different score on every hole which led us into a period of exercising our grey cells trying to work out how many different scores were possible when multiplying 3 combinations of 1s, 2s, 3s and 4s. This distraction led to a sudden drop in concentration with the result that 3 of our number scored zero points on the 11th which was a combination that we had n’t taken into account.
The denouement over Temple’s usual excellent lunch fare revealed the team scores to be as follows:
Team 1 – Alan, JohnT, MikeW and Pete F 48 + 43 = 91
Team 2 – JohnH, PeterR, Richard and Stuart 88 + 52 = 140 (claiming all of the BashCoins)
Team 3 – Bill, MikeS, Nick and Roger 78 + 44 = 122
I think everyone enjoyed the day but maybe next time a more relaxed scoring system might meet wider approval.
