Not quite everybody who was there, but almost.
Click on it to see a larger image.
| Here's the cast of
characters. Not quite everybody who was there, but almost. Click on it to see a larger image. |
 Chapel Hill Golf
Course gets its name from a large old church at the top of a hill
outside Mt. Vernon, OH. The church has been converted to the clubhouse for the
golf course, and dominates the scenery around the first, second, ninth,
and eighteenth holes. In fact, it just begs to be in photos of the
beginning and ends of rounds of golf.It also provides a fine background for old friends to greet one another after a year away. There was a lot of that going on. Thor got there first, as usual, and was disconcerted when nobody showed up for twenty minutes or more. Turns out that he thought the first tee time was at 8:00, when he had correctly posted that it would be at 8:30. Anyway, most of us got there; no harm no foul. Coops was late, even for Coops. A family emergency caused him to miss the morning round (and caused me to drive out without my usual co-pilot). And Tex was in a fender-bender on the way to the airport. Apparently not serious enough to send anybody to the hospital, but he missed his plane and never got there. Anyway, here is the beginning of our weekend of golf, in the shadow of the chapel on the hill: |
||||||||
 Warren lines up his putt on #18 (Thor photo)  Mark's tee shot on #7 (DaveT photo)I played the morning round with Thor, Warren Montgomery, and Thor's friend from work Jerry Raack. All much bigger hitters than I am, so I had to hit good irons and short game to keep up. Sometimes I was able to, but definitely not always. We had a great time. Jerry collected a couple of birdies on the back nine. I had to be content with occasional great shots, like hitting the green on #18 from 170 yards away. Bear in mind that there is a big lake in front of the green, as you can see in the picture at the left. In the afternoon, I played with Mark Georg, Gary Hayenga, and Chuck Bernard. The picture at the right shows Mark teeing off at the very difficult seventh hole. He placed the shot perfectly on the 150yd marker at the corner of the dogleg -- which was a long way off... great drive. Then he had to hit across a pond to a narrow green with ball-losing deep rough on the right and more pond on the left. Coops showed up late for the afternoon tee time. Not almost late, actually late. (Is this a first? Perhaps! He is a grandmaster at "almost late".) He and Lee Hou drove out Friday morning, and had not arrived at the tail end of the tee times. Kern Singh and Neal Bell agreed to drop back to the last group, then waiting another half hour before Coops and Lee arrived to fill out the final foursome -- muttering something about being stopped by cops on the PaTurnpike. That's their story and they're sticking to it. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
| After
the round, we all adjourned to a barbeque dinner at Thor's house. Of
course, some of us had
trouble finding the place. Q: What happens when you put a dyslexic
address into a GPS? A: You hear, "You have arrived at your
destination," when you obviously haven't -- out in the middle of
nowhere. BTW, Thor's house is out in farm country (I think the
property is 18 acres), and there's a Bobcat service sign on his mailbox
to further throw off the casual Thor-seeker. The food was delicious -- especially Joey Collard's incomparable recipe for potato salad. And I got to say hello to Annie for the first time in many years. |
| Saturday morning started with trouble.
I was shuttling Mr.10 to the golf course, and he discovered he was
missing his keys. I convinced him to have breakfast, and we discussed
strategies for dealing with the likely-looking possibility that they
were not going to be found. We talked details like whether a locksmith
or the Mitsubishi dealer would be open for that sort of work on
Saturday, and whether they would need Jon's presence. (They better
require his presence, and his photo ID, and his registration. If they
don't, I can think of several ways to steal a car.) Anyway, I suggested
he look in the other small pocket in his golf bag. "No, I never, ever put my keys there."
Well OK, Jon, but we still haven't found them. PS - Jon came to me in the middle of the day with a Mitsubishi key in his hand. He found it in the pocket I had suggested. Jon, I do this stuff all the time with my wife; I'm an expert in guessing where other people misplaced things. PPS - At the Saturday night story session, Jon told this story -- in about five times as many words as I just used. Then Thor summarized the story. "Jon lost his keys. Then he found them." Thor, you missed your calling; you should have been a journalist.  Dave Osborne showed up early enough to play the Tunamint round, then disappeared again. (Thor photo)But Jon's lost keys weren't enough. The GPS app in his smart-phone tried to get us both lost as well. It failed, but it tried. Eventually we did get to Clover Valley, the tournament venue. There was the usual hustle and bustle outside the clubhouse and on the first tee. Wee Mon was canvassing everybody for the skins pool. I haven't been close to a skin in years, so I never enter. "Dave, wanna be in the skins pool? Just five dollars." "No thanks, Patrick." "Are you sure?" "I'm sure, Patrick!" "But it's a lot of fun." "What part of 'no' don't you understand?!?" I was relieved that he doesn't live in New York, and didn't give me the line from the commercial, "You've got to be in it to win it." I was in a foursome with Joe Dean, Coops, and Patrick Inglis (Pesky Canadian #2A, as he was calling himself this weekend). Fun group! We watched open-mouthed as Wee Mon demolished all the long-drive hole distances. He claimed two of the four long drive prizes, moving the stake by 40 and 80 yards respectively. Why only two prizes? On the front nine, he was long but hadn't found his direction yet. On one hole, his provisional was 60 yards beyond the stake, but second balls don't count. On the other long-drive hole, his ball rolled off into the rough -- after he had already bounced and rolled 30 yards past the stake in the fairway. Awesome! I got off to a very good start (par-par-bogey-par), and my front nine score wasn't bad; it was even bogey, which is close to net par for my handicap. But on the back nine, I lost any sense of direction off the tee and lost five balls, which is ten strokes worth (stroke and distance five times). I wound up with a 57 on the back nine, for a total of 102. Dismal, I thought. Hold that thought! Here are a few situations that look like Match Play Madness, but actually happened in the Tunamint round. |
||||||||
 (Thor photo) Usually, when a ball goes into the lake, it's gone. Sometimes it will skip a few times before it sinks. But Rock got really lucky. His ball normally would have skipped to the stone retaining wall and ricocheted back into the lake. But the water level was low, and there was more than ten feet of dry land. Rock's shot was not an easy one; the ball was close to the wall, and the lie was hardly plush fairway. But he managed to pitch onto the green with no penalty. Hey, Rock, what's with the crosshanded grip for pitching? |
||||||||
The fourteenth hole's novelty
prize was for closest to the pin from off the green, no matter how many
shots it took to get there nor from how far off the green. This generated a
number of novel approaches:
|
||||||||
 Don't squeeze the Charmin. Super-soft fairways. (Thor photo) The course played long and tough. "How tough was it, Dave?" It was SO tough that:
 John calls Tex support (DaveT photo) (1) Tex was not present, and he is always the scorekeeper. He has a spreadsheet to handle everything; the only manual operation should be entering the scores. He emailed the spreadsheet to us, so the scores could be tabulated without retraining somebody to do things manually. But the program was doing very badly with the skins results. For instance, it awarded at least one skin when there was another identical score for the hole. And Nick Mock, the big skins winner, kept getting richer or poorer with every bug that was uncovered. Thor had to keep calling back all the skins money and redistribute new amounts. After the third "recall", substitute scorekeeper vander Pflum placed a call to Tex support. (I'm trying to remember who coined that wonderful phrase. Bill-O?) (2) One of the bugs was that the spreadsheet was improperly dealing with golfers not in the skins pool. Thor announced that I had won a skin with my (sand save!) par on the second hole. Instantly -- only nanoseconds went by -- Wee Mon was on his feet fairly shouting, "Tutelman isn't in the skins pool!!!" Serves me right, I suppose. He was even more emphatic than I was earlier in the day. |
||||||||
And here are the obligatory
pictures of the presentations:
|
You already know the outcome -- which for Saturday afternoon
is always less important than the process. So let's go to the
videotape. Well, we don't have videos. But we do have stills.
Paul Osad was my Match Play Madness opponent. We played with Jon/Steve and Steve/Jon. I think one of them won. Paul and I halved the first hole with bogeys, both of us just missing makeable par putts. We then proceeded to alternate wins on every hole through the eighth. Since Paul won the first non-halved hole, we alternated between all square and Paul one up. So I stood on the ninth tee one down, needing to win the hole to halve the match. As you see in the photos below, Paul drove into deep, dense cabbage. We were amazed to even find it, and Paul's punch-out was nearly miraculous. I didn't think we would even find the ball after he tried a whack at it; he'd just knock it deeper into the salad. Anyway, I was now in a position of having to go for the green with a middle iron, because a halve would do me no good. Almost made it, too; my six-iron splashed about five feet short of dry land. Match over! Paul also went for the green and splashed -- but it didn't count; once I had drowned a ball, he had won the match.
 (DaveT photo)Dinner was at Champps, a sports bar with a varied menu, good food, and large portions. It was within walking distance of the hotel. Good thing, because we needed to walk it off. (Thor photo) 
Every RSG-Ohio -- usually on Saturday night -- Rock gets involved in something where my instinctive reaction is, "I don't want to know!" |
 Greetings all around on Sunday morning. (Thor photo)Champions is a Columbus municipal course, and something of a favorite of mine. It's a Robert Trent Jones Sr design, as is my home course in NJ. (Thor won't allow me to say H----- H---, so I won't.) But some of the holes at Champions look more like Tillinghast designs. I have in mind the eighth and, to a lesser extent, the fifteenth. I played with Nick Mock and Carla Montgomery. At first, we were a little put off by the slow greens (especially after the fast greens yesterday at Clover Valley). But the rhythm of a well-designed course overcame this -- even though we were still leaving putts short at the end of the round. For much of the back nine, the skies were rumbling overhead. But not a drop fell while we were still at the course. Once Lee and I were in the car and traveling east on I-70, the skies opened up with real lightning and rain. But on the course was only sound. We had Thor, and were not intimidated. |
 Pflagstick & Wee Mon for Canada. Thor & Hoskins for the States. (Thor photo) There is a traditional International Match on RSG-Ohio Sunday between the Pesky Canadians and a couple of low-handicap Americans. This year, both sides hired mercenaries. The Pflumster became an honorary Canadian, and Thor implored Jim Hoskins (first ever winner of the Maroon Jacket, in 1996) to attend for the first time in over a decade. (I am told that John had to agree to drive home to Cincinnati via Toronto, in order to play for Canada.) Patrick showed up with genuine uniforms for Team Canada. They looked more like hockey shirts than golf shirts. But then, they also played it like hockey. Jim finished the round limping, and Thor was missing two teeth. And the Canadians won.  Patrick faces a difficult lie. (Thor photo)  John gets a worm's eye view of his putt. Villegas could have done it better. But I certainly could not. (Thor photo) |
