By TONY CHERBY/For the Sentinel
BUENA VISTA – The rules covering golf scrambles are many and varied and I’d review a few here but only if you were having trouble falling asleep. Not only that, but once a foursome is out of sight of any reliable witnesses, who knows what goes on anyway?
In any case, the Ocean City Tuesday Senior Golf League best ball scramble July 7 began and ended with a bit of a dispute over whether a threesome gets an extra shot, since foursomes get four tries. I’d like to say that the debate was settled by way of a good old food fight featuring those ubiquitous burned pretzels that Hawthorne and Cornell ingest with gusto. But truth be told, Robert “Bobby the Cart Guy” DeFonzo, an internationally renowned hostage negotiator, was called in to make a final ruling. “Yes!” declared Bobby, “threesomes do get an extra shot. Of course. Team members rotate getting two shots. Duh.”
Which of course does give them an advantage, no question about it. If I get two tries, 83.97 percent of the time I’ll do better the second time. That’s a verifiable fact I just came up with. And it might help explain why the two threesomes ended up T-1. But what are you going to do? Not giving them a fourth shot is less fair than not letting them have one.
Here’s another secret. Cart guys run golf courses. When I was a 12-year-old caddy, being a cart guy is what I wanted to be when I grew up. That or a cowboy. B Remember Kevin at Harbor Pines? And the late Ronnie Ward at Mays Landing? In the 1960s, Ronnie was head pro at Woodcrest Country Club in Cherry Hill (now the pricey Legacy Club). He knew Winifred Walzer before Arnie did. He was at a tournament at Shawnee on the Delaware the day they met. (They later married; Winnie and Arnie, not Ronnie and Arnie.)
Here’s a snippet from what Ronnie had to say: “Fred Warning, who owned the place, had a daughter named Dixie, and Dixie’s buddy was Winnie Walzer. The Walzer family liked to hang around the club but they didn’t play golf…. Winnie used to hang around the pool a lot .… Fred’s daughter Dixie was a cutie pie and her friend Winnie was as cute as a bell and it was Winnie Walzer who caught Palmer’s eye.”
Ronnie also showed up once unannounced on a Sunday morning at Ben Hogan’s house in Texas, asking for a lesson. Hogan answered the door in a bathrobe, half asleep, and told him to come back later. Ronnie got his lesson.
Where would we be without guys like Ronnie, Kevin and now our Bobby to show us where the heck they put our golf bags and where we need to go to hit the ball for our shotgun starts? Think about it. This is our fifth year at Buena Vista Country Club and I still can’t find the 17th tee unless I just left the 16th green.
Back to business. Two scramble teams came back to the table at -2. Team Roger Probert, Doug Baird and Tony Cornell birdied 2, 6, 10 and 14, and got a bogey on the fiendish 13th. Team DeLanzo, Schultz and Hawthorne bagged birdies on 4, 6, and 8 and also carded a bogey on 13. Since 13 is our hardest hole, it’s the tiebreaker, according to our rules guru, William “Fancy Pants” Wright. But in the case of a tie on 13, hole 10, our next hardest hole, becomes the tiebreaker. Hawthorne, et. al. birdied 10, while DeLanzo & Co. got a par. So, Probert, Cornell and Baird are this week’s official Scramble Winners.
As for the other four teams, Chris Ramsay, Dane Mayson, Stan Borucki and Mark Franks birdied 4, 7 and 17 but bogied on 15 and 18, leaving them with a final score of -1 and a third-place finish. Mark Lapham, Bill Gardner, Lee Hollerbach and Tom Gahr came home in even par. Team Greg Harlan, George Curtis, Bob England and new member Kevin Greene were next at +2. Team Bob Van Zandt, Dave Carter, Ed Lyons and Frank Coppenbarger finished the day at +3.
If you are an assiduous reader of these weekly screeds, you may have realized by now that the results here are much higher than what our scrambles usually produce. That’s because a different format was used. Each team used the best drive on each hole, as usual, but from then on everyone played their own balls. (We usually use each best ball after each shot.) The best individual score then becomes the tally for each hole. Not that anyone asked, but if you want to get technical, this is known as a “Continuous Cycle” scramble. And now, you know. (That would make a great Jeopardy question.)
This week we resumed regular match play in our Race to September. We have completed six rounds of competition, so believe it or not, we are about at the mid-point of our 2026 season. At our age, the bottom of the cup gets farther and farther away and time goes by quicker and quicker.
