Regular readers of this column may (or may not) recall that last week I was able to announce the arrival of geo-fencing at Temple which is designed to stop buggy drivers going in anywhere near the direction that they want to go in – specifically the tees and greens. If you cross once of these invisible boundaries, the buggy is brought to a shuddering halt and you have to work out where the nearest point of relief is that you can reach going backwards.
I opined at the time that such a system would be one step too far to manage for the Ballbashing buggy-rider who would ideally like to drive into the middle of the green and lean out of the buggy to putt his ball in the direction of the hole rather as though he was playing four-wheeled polo. He does not wish to be forced to stop 100 yards from the green and have to struggle up to the green on foot. That is why he has rented the buggy in the first place.
Mike S and Bill undertook the first voyage through the geo-fenced maze today and, judging from the amount of steam emanating from Mike’s ears when he finished the round, it was not a happy experience. Stuart suggested to Mike that he might like to report his problems to the Pro’s shop to which Mike’s response was that life was too short and he wanted to get home before Xmas.
Read last week’s report if you want some constructive ideas on how best to navigate the maze.
The perfect number of 6 Ballbashers turned out to play today and the balls fell so that JohnS, RobM and I formed one team and MikeS, Stuart and Bill the other. The orange tee fell pointing towards our team and so off we went first. The team competition was based on the best 2 scores out of the 3 on each hole. We started well on the 1st hole when my approach shot bounced kindly off the back edge of the right-hand bunker to finish about 6 feet from the hole from where I sank the putt for a birdie – all totally planned of course.
What followed afterwards on the front 9 was an amazing range of team scores from 1 to 8. The latter being when both Rob and John scored 4 for 4 points on the 6th hole. Given that Rob was using every square meter of the course apart from the fairways, this was some kind of miracle. Rob then extremely optimistically suggested that we had got all of the bad shots out of the way which brought to my mind Hercules 5th labour of cleaning out the Augean stables in one day – supposedly an impossible task set him by the very upset Hera. Of course he diverted a couple of rivers and the job was easy-peasy. If Hera had had her head screwed on, she would have got Hercules to attempt to get out of one of Temple’s rain-sodden bunkers. I am not saying that either of my playing partners had ever suggested that they were Hercules reborn but there were some instances when they would still be trying to get out of the bunker in a year’s time – way over the 24 hour limit.
You may gather from this that we enjoyed some erudite conversations on our way round as Rob passed across us on the fairway going from left to right and then right to left. We discussed the recent advances in medical research which suggest that we are not too far away from producing an anti-ageing pill. We were not totally clear whether this would enable you to stay at any selected age but Rob said that he would be very happy to stay at the age he is presumably because he gets some masochistic pleasure zig-zagging done the fairways. This is all probably too late for us judging by the fact that 9 out of 16 Ballbashers are currently suffering from some malaise or another which is sufficient to keep them off the golf course and we really needed the pill about 10 years ago.
On arriving back at the clubhouse on top of the hill we were able to hope that Alan and Maureen had been able to find safety in Miami at the top of a tower block. Milton sounds far too nasty to observe up close at ground level.
Despite the very erratic nature of our scores it seems that our total was sufficient to win the BashCoins:
JohnS, Richard and RobM: 39 + 34 = 73
Bill, MikeS and Stuart: 35 + 29 = 64
As far as the Autumn League is concerned, of which the was game 1, the scores were very close bar one:
Richard (37), MikeS (28), Bill, JohnS and Stuart (25) and Rob (23)
Despite some dampness on the 1st tee, it did n’t rain on us and the butternut squash soup plus foccacia was excellent.
Brilliant report !
Brilliant. I need lessons in Hercules, Augean, and Hera to follow this most erudite of Bashreports. My shallow Hawaiian education is to blame for my speechless humbling.