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Sunday 7 August 2016

A brief summary.....

A very good morning to all my followers, Oh, and it's been brought to my attention I have a few curtain twitchers looking in now from my club at Coventry, so, good morning to you all as well ;-)

Firstly I apologise for the lack of up-to-date posts, everything has been a little hectic of late with playing, practice, lessons and some work, yes I do go to work at times between all my golfing exploits.

Since my last post I played in an Open at Beau Desert, a real favorite course of mine.  I needed the help of my playing partners on 2 (two) occasions to look for my ball with a couple of loose drives but I still managed to complete the round with the same ball, and belive me, around Beau Desert I'll take that as a huge positive.



Nowhere near the prizes but a very enjoyable experience as always and a great test for me with all the changes I'm still going through.

My June Medal saw me level par (73) which again was a huge result for my confidence with all the changes I'm trying to master, the 6 (six) doubles or worse are what are destroying my cards currently, luckily I got 2 decent birdies to go with only 3 gross pars which helped bring down my score, but I've really got to manage my game a little better to be consistently under a gross 90 if I truly want to address my handicap.

The following day I played in an Open at Melton Mowbray, I hadn't played the course before but I was in good company with friends from Woodhall Spa and Beedles lake, both very good golfers, of which 1 (Gary from Beedles L:ake) has just broken his course record, well done mate.

Some blind drives and tricky approaches and the greens were OK but a bit slow, unfortunately the fairways could have done with a shave though, it was frustrating at times when you perfectly struck your ball down the fairway only for it to roll up to a clump of grass!  Anyway, again nowhere near the prizes but a very enjoyable day and we all came away with a large Pork Pie, I suppose you can't complain when it's only £15.00.

The Beaton Cup is somewhat of a 2-day affair with a dinner before the match on the Friday night where bidding (auction) is carried out on all the players in the competition, I'd never come across or heard of this before and it was great fun.  There are some serious organised syndicates which I found out quite early on as I went to sit at a table with some weekend playing partners only to be told that I couldn't sit with them as their syndicate were all sitting together, so I sat on a table on my own nearby where some other members then joined me and we formed our own, on the night syndicate and the auction duly started.

You could tell that some had put far more thought into this event than it being just a bit of fun, afterall, I soon realised there could be some serious money to be won.  It was quite strange sitting there having people bid on you when your name came out, but with just playing to handicap the week before I think that helped me raise a respectable figure otherwise it could have been quite embarrassing!

Saturday came, it wasn't a heavy night of drinking at the dinner/auction even though I was sat with a few lads that are known for a good drink ;-), so, I felt quietly confident of putting a decent round together.  The nett result was I played to buffer (75 par 73), I was 12 over at the turn with 3 decent regulation pars but managed to pull some shots back on the tougher back 9 with 4 good pars, 3 of them on the belt on our 12th, 13th & 14th holes, it's just these doubles again that are destroying me, if I can just get them down to single bogeys this handicap will tumble as I'm averaging 6-7 gross pars a round, woulda-coulda-shoulda!

The results were in and the Beaton Cup was tied, 1 of the lads sat at my/our syndicate table and 1 of my regular weekend playing partners on the table I was moved off! There was a small air of skullduggery as the competition result showed our man as winning but as they both had the same score we appreciated that the main cup and honour couldn't go to countback so they had to play another round for the outright winner to be crowned, however, as far as the auction was concerned, we did pick the outright winner on the day and he went on to win the play-off, but we had to share our winnings who technically came 2nd on both counts!

Anyway, a great bit of fun and more importantly for me, 2 back-to-back buffers in medal rounds so I'm starting to get to grips with the changes.

I've got to sign off now as I'm getting ready for my 3-day trip to Gainsborough, further updates on July & August will follow when I get back which will include a trip to Forest Pines, a trip McDonald's Portal, some more weekend competitions, Woodhall Spa Open (Hotchkin) and this trip to Gainsborough, so, until then, keep 'em straight....