By TONY CHERBY/For the Sentinel
BUENA VISTA — Last week in the writeup for the Ocean City Tuesday Senior Golf League, I bemoaned how tough it is to putt for dough on fast, dried out greens. Turns out the guardian golf god who looks after us follows Ocean City Sentinel sports. On Monday, she dumped so much rain on Buena Vista Country Club that they closed the course there and started advertising beach-front properties.
She cleared things up nicely for us on Tuesday, gifting us with a day more like mid-June than early August.
Most anyone who can sit up and take nourishment despises August’s stifling dog days, but they didn’t make an appearance. This time, our weather woes revolved around leftover moisture from torrential rains a day earlier. Spongey greens made putting for dough more like putting on dough. After weeks of playing on hard, fast carpets, adjusting to fuzzy wet ones was difficult. Striking putts hard enough to get to the hole was mind-bogglingly tough, so we came up short all over the place.
It reminded me of a pro-am years ago that featured Yogi Berra, a lousy golfer. It unfolded on live TV. He hit a wood when they were wood, that is, to 4 feet on a 150-yard par-3. Then his first putt went halfway to the hole. After a second try, the ball was still 2 inches short. In a post-game interview, Bob Costas asked Yogi about that 3-putt from 4 feet. “Well,” he said, “if I’d hit it harder, I’d have missed it shorter.” And if you were at BVCC on Aug. 4, that classic Yogism makes perfect sense. It was a day when there was no such thing as a forward roll, or even a small bounce in any direction.
Team Hawthorne, Hollerbach and Schultz, which sounds like a law firm from Beesleys Point, didn’t seem to mind one bit. They manufactured a great round on a difficult day for most of us, birdying 5, 13, 16 and 17 on a “clean card” – they didn’t sniff a bogey.
Team Chestnut, Harlan and Mackey was even 1 better in the fluttery fellows count, taking care of birdie business on holes 3, 6, 7, 14 and 16. A lone bogey did rattle their tees on 11, but what led to their demise was a par on 13, a fine tally on that demonic piece of territory. But not this time, when it landed them in second place. I’ll tell you why, but you have to stay awake.
Turns out Hawthorne or someone must have sent Bill “Rules Guru” Wright photos of the cards showing -4s. Wild Bill was in Cowtown or somewhere at the time. Upon seeing two cards sporting 4-under, he dug out his Tiebreaker Protocols that were next to the remains of a bag of Cheetos under the seat of his car. (All our rules are inscribed on yellow Post-it notes.) He assiduously studied the cards and pronounced that, since Rich, Lee and Rick birdied 13, our tiebreaker hole, and the other 3 only parred it, then voila! They won!
For the rest of us, it was a very tough day for scoring. Well, for scoring well. It made Kevin Greene think about taking up bowling, and I considered bocce. The third-place team – Dave Carter, Mark Franks and Bob England – came back to the barn at +1, and the other five threesomes who will remain nameless here posted this list of not-so-memorable cards: +3, +3, +4, +7, and +9. Turns out that six groups managed to bag just five birdies. Wow. If you were to come across the scorecards for all our “Best Ball” scrambles, you wouldn’t have to be Norman Einstein or even Happy the Clown to see that this was our highest-scoring one. Example: cards from the June 9 event show -6, -5, -3, -3, -1.
Now, if you do want to see who all these guys were and probably still are, and what they scored and even what they were wearing, like Bill Wright’s hat and shirt (not to mention his socks), ones that would make a freight train and the sensor in my camera take a dirt road, go to the “Photos” section of our website at ocstgl.golfleague3.net/
Next week, we return to our match play format. The count is nine rounds down, with four to go, before until our final scramble on Sept. 15. That’s when we host and toast ourselves over lunch while recognizing our Season’s Best winners.
