Adopting Dominic C’s argot, nobody popped in for a trolley at Winter Hill yesterday but, in sticking to a more common interpretation, that’s not true because Bill did actually pop in and hire a trolley. But conversely the 6 BBs who turned up to play stuck to their decision and did not seek any cancellation, despite the shaky weather forecast, but we did agree, in deference to the BB buggy riders who had to travel on foot, that we would only play 9 holes. This transpired to be a very sensible decision.
Sensible in that it limited the number of times that we got saturated – particularly Pete who does not believe in making himself weatherproof. Because, boy did it rain!
It was a Novelty format day and, to compound the weather’s stresses, we agreed to play a multiplier game in which each team multiplied the 2 best scores out of their 3 on each hole. Even those amongst us whose arithmetic studies terminated at O Level, will know that such a system runs a severe risk of getting 0 (Zero) on a hole when two out of the three players blob. Given the total lack of any run on the fairway due to them being saturated, it is an absolute miracle that neither team blobbed a single hole and, one team in particular scored amazingly well.
The balls were thrown and the first team away comprised MikeS, Peter and Robert and they were followed by Bill, Pete and myself. One thing was for sure and that was that you did not want to into any bunker. The tide was still in in some of them which did at least give the opportunity to drop the ball in the least wet place. Otherwise you were faced with playing off something that resembled Southend Beach five minutes after the sea had departed and risked a severe sand splattering. Unfortunately I failed to avoid this fate on several holes.
Elsewhere in the team it was apparent that playing in regular passing downpours seriously improved my team mates’ golf. Bill was hitting the ball really well and it was difficult to know if this was due to being not in a buggy or that it was better to look downwards to avoid getting rain in our eyes. Pete was also hitting the ball well, and given that I was the only person in our team with a possibility of seeing even which side of the fairway the balls had gone, I had my work cut out.
With Pete getting a 3 for 4 points on the 3rd hole, we had racked up 18 points after three holes and stupidly worked out that we therefore should be reaching 54 points after nine holes which should be good enough to win. That would have been the case but, as soon as we had performed this calculation a wheel or two fell off and, for five out of the next six holes our second-best score was 1 point and multiplying the best score by 1 is not hugely good news especially if the best score was a very well worked par for 3 points. This can lead to difficult relationships developing in a team but we were so busy keeping the rain out, survival was the top thing on our minds.
Winter Hill had given us a special rate for nine holes (typical of their excellent customer service) with the opportunity of topping up our payment if we decided to play the second 9. It would not have altered our decision but we were grateful to see that the team in front had not started up the 10th fairway and had retired to the clubhouse.
There we discovered that we had been well and truly beaten by 45 points to 34. The two walking buggy riders in their team, Mike and Peter, had scored 17 and 18 points respectively which was mighty impressive in the circumstances and must bring into question the benefit of buggy-riding in normal drier times. They had three holes on which two of them scored 3 points giving them three 9-pointers on their card – the best we had was one 8.
We then spent a happy hour covering the normal wide range of topics but, in particular, the danger of being scammed following on from Robert’s recent experience where he was lucky not to lose quite a big wedge of folding stuff. It is always easy to see the mistakes in hindsight but everyone probably has an Achilles heal waiting to be exploited by a random scammer.
We then retired home and found that, contrary to most forecasts, the weather in the afternoon was much better.
