Back to the tee
As the PGA tournament began at Wentworth yesterday two other golfers continued their attempts to return to the fray. Whilst Tiger Woods wisely announced his intention to take his time following his latest back surgery, in scorchingly hot conditions I took another step on the road back to the top after my hip replacement on a large, open, golf club not far from Guildford that I had never visited previously.
According to my Garmin wristband fitness device I knocked out 25,050 steps yesterday – most of them on said course.
My three playing partners and I have been raising divots together together in one line-up or another (yesterday a foursome) for the best part of twenty eight years at a wide variety of UK courses ranging from Hayling Island to Carnoustie and at golf resorts all over the continent from Portugal to Slovenia.
We have a raft of unique rules that apply only to ourselves – for example, every green requires everyone to putt out (no gimmees) and, rather than return to the tee if you lose your ball you simply put another down roughly where you think you lost it and take a two-shot penalty instead of retracing your steps and hitting another for a single shot addition to your card – but yesterday I encountered another I had not come across before (they’d introduced it since I had stopped playing for two years because of my pre-op hip difficulties), viz. that the maximum score recorded for posterity on any hole is 9.
This novelty worked considerably to my advantage.
Whereas in the past, if I got into difficulties on any given hole [yesterday’s 17th was a good example, after three attempts to hit a drive across the formidable lake in front of the tee that all went straight into the drink – one of them (even if I say so myself) worthy of a ‘style point’ at least for imitating a Barnes Wallis-designed Dam Buster bouncing bomb before disappearing into its watery grave] in past contests I would have been facing the prospect of taking my next shot as ‘9 off the tee’ and might have ended the hole with a score of somewhere between 14 and 20.
Under the new rule, however, yesterday I was able to declare “9!” and thereafter walk the hole without having to play any golf, thereby saving myself somewhere between five and eleven shots.
All I wish to record here is that yesterday I notched six ‘9’s in my gross score of 123 in finishing joint-last of our four.
It’s either a sign of the times, or one of my advancing seniority, that immediately upon my arrival home after struggling through the chaos of the London M25 motorway, I succumbed to an urgent need to run myself a piping hot bubble bath and have a half-hour soak.
The first purpose of this rare activity – I’m normally a shower man, me – was to rest and hopefully revive my aching limbs and sinews (the Wales rugby squad famously habitually retires to a minus 25 degrees centigrade cryogenic chamber to aid its recovery, so maybe going to the other extreme was a mistake on my part but it felt ‘right’ at the time).
The second was to cleanse my body of the accumulated grime of the outing and also the half a bottleful of sun tan lotion that I had poured over my head and upper limbs before teeing off in an attempt to protect myself from the baking sunshine.
The move was built upon foundations of good intentions but from holes 2 to 7 it caused me constant difficulty. Having begun to ‘sweat up’, the lotion began to seep into my eyes, causing a severe stinging sensation that restricted my vision and required me to wipe them with a small towel before taking every shot.
And, dear reader, those are the sum of my excuses as to why I played just as badly as normal yesterday – a mix of the occasional outstanding drive or ‘recovery’ shot from the deep rough (on the one hand) and an otherwise never-ending series of fluffs, shanks, slices and cocked chips from anywhere near the green (on the other).
One positive aspect of the outing occurred to me whilst on the way home.
It was perhaps no accident that two of my opponents yesterday finished eleven shots in front of the pair of us bringing up the rear. They were both taking the contest rather seriously and were trying their hardest on every hole.
In contrast my fellow back-marker – being our eldest participant and recently having been suffering from health problems – was struggling in the blistering conditions from the ‘off’ and in fact retired from the competition with three holes to play because at that point we were physically almost alongside the clubhouse.
A tough inquest into my result, however, revealed the conclusion that, probably for at least the last two decades, I have taken the attitude to playing golf that I was out for a stroll in the countryside and then, as some sort of diversion, every now and again was attempting to hit the cover off a little white ball for no particular reason.
And only been semi-successful at it.
