When I arrived in the Harleyford car park, the first person I encountered was Nick who was looking up at the sky with a frown on his face. When I enquired as to what was troubling him, he replied that he was concerned that we would be caught out in a torrential downpour as predicted in the doom-laden BBC weather forecast. With the arrival of the 4 other members we were able to check 6 alternative weather apps and since none of them agreed with each other, we negotiated a future discount with the Pro Shop in the event that we were driven off the course by a tsunami , and set off to play.
In deference to the LGBTQ++NB lobbies, Harleyford has re-colour-coded the tees Gold, Black, Purple, Silver and Blue – slightly surprisingly not the colours of the rainbow. Fortunately I had played on Monday and knew that Purple was the new Yellow. The balls fell so that MikeS, PeterR and I formed one group and Nick, JohnT and JohnS the other.
Harleyford closely resembled Wycombe Heights in that the fairways were made of parched, packed earth and the greens and surrounds were a verdant green. But that was where the resemblance ended because if you hit the ball with any element of the club in a straight direction, that was more-or-less where the ball went and we were not threatened with losing balls with every shot into bramble patches and over cliffs. The greens were very smooth and very quick so they were not easy. But despite the extreme conditions there was some very good scoring from some of our group.
We were playing for the Harleyford Plate as well as an Eclectic round and this turned out to work very well for some. Peter went off like a train and had 12 points after 5 holes. In contrast Mike and my scores added together equalled 12 points and while Mike was to make a big comeback, I completely failed in my attempts to post a half-decent score.
When we reached the turn, Peter had scored 20 points and our team had 18 points as a team score (the normal eclectic method of only including 3 or 4-pointers in the team score applied) and I had contributed a big fat zero to our team score. Mike unfortunately lost his ball on the 9th when hitting a perfectly straightforward 7-iron as his second shot down the hill towards the green. This seemed to upset him somewhat and he responded by scoring 10 points on the next 3 holes which enabled him to draw level with Peter in the fight for the Plate.
Unbeknownst to us, behind us, JohnS had reached the turn with 19 points to which he added a nice 4 for 4 on the 11th, a feat he repeated on the 15th thereby seriously improving his eclectic score. Standing on the 18th tee, Mike had 35 points, Peter had 36 points and just behind us, JohnS had 35 points as well.
Sadly for John and Peter, they both hit their tee-shots out of bounds while desperately trying not to – the latter normally causes the former in my experience and while Mike hit a dreadful scuff of a tee-shot in an unhelpful direction, he managed to scrabble his way to add one additional point to his score to also reach 36. But his 21 points on the back 9 beat Peter’s 16 so he won the Plate on countback.
Somewhat to our horror, we discovered over a relaxing drink on the patio that the other team had scored 22 points on the front 9 easily beating our 18 ( I should n’t actually use the word “our” in this context because I contributed zero points to our team score). But on the back 9 “our” 22 beat their 14 and so we won overall.
The Harleyford Plate scores were: MikeS (36), PeterR (36), JohnS (35), Nick (29), Richard (26) and JohnT (25).
The rain of course had still not arrived when we left – Nick definitely needs to get a new piece of seaweed – and everyone agreed that it had been a good afternoon and nice to play Harleyford again after such a long break.
