Whitefield 2023 Match Report
Myself, Jimmy and Frank were the three combatants for the morning honours. Frank emerged as victor and insisted he had a good score. If this were true, I must have mis-scored some of his holes on my scorecard. Anyway, congratulations to this happy but deluded winner!
We were joined by 8 other players in the afternoon making a slightly disappointing total of 11 participants. I can't remember when it started raining, but I think it rained for most of the round, which made a normally tough-scoring course even more difficult.
First group out consisted of Glenn R, Frank and Derek. With a handicap of 18, Derek is a winner waiting to happen and his excellent score of 36 looked unbeatable in the conditions of the day which was confirmed by his playing partners scores of 25 and 29. This score looked so good that I paid out the person who had had a bet at 3/1 on Derek winning before I knew all the other scores. You may find this hard to believe from your educated, intelligent, former bookmaker correspondent, but I'm the same bloke who, before the internet age, used to let one of my customers bet on the German second division and rely on him to give me the results, which, not surprisingly, turned out to be a complete work of fiction. I only did it because I thought all Sikhs were honourable! The next Sikh I met tried to charge me £20 for a half mile taxi ride up a hill on a straight road in Windsor (I was with 2 fat mates), and was given a fiver for his trouble and lucky not to get a kukri in his chest!
I digress. Group 2 consisted of myself of myself, Jimmy, Tony and Bob. Par-par meant 6 points after 2 holes for me, and I think we can all work out how many points that would give me after 18 holes! Unfortunately, I was 37 points short of this mythical target to record possibly my worst score ever on a golf course which included no less than 8 blobs! Jimmy and Tony didn't fare much better with scores of 21 and 20 respectively. Winner of our group was Bob, whose very steady short game saw him accumulate 27 points.
Only one group remaining comprising of Andy, Pete and the 2 Finemen (can't bring myself to write Finemans....it looks such bad English!).Pete scored a creditable 27 and Andy had a great score, in the conditions, of 34 points. However, there was a score better than that in the group! If I start to write my usual gubbins about a Fine golfer and a Fine human being, you might think you know what is coming next, but the first word of the next sentence might surprise you ..... Paul Fineman who is, of course, a Fine golfer and a Fine human being has spent much of his golfing career in the shadow of his more (some might say over-) loquacious sibling Steve, but every Fineman has his day, and this day was Paul's. His score of 37 belied belief on this tough course in these tough conditions despite the fact he only scored 7 points on the last 5 holes. Well done Paul! A 24 pointer from Stevie completes the scoring.
P.S I recovered the mistakenly paid out winnings in both scenarios.
