This was my first Member/Member Tournament at the Plateau Club. Unfortunately, Rick wasn't able to play this time around so I was paired up with a guy named Dave. Nice guy with a swing that is kind of like John Daly -- minus some of the control. When he connected, though, the ball went really far. Since his handicap is more than 10 strokes above minue, though, he had to play to a lower handicap to keep to a maximum 10 stroke differential. Not the biggest deal, but those strokes would show up over the weekend.
We started with a 9 hole skins game on Friday night. The course was set up as tough as they could make it. The front 9 was playing from the blacks and all 18 had insane pin positions. We didn't win anything (only 2 skins counted overall, since they needed to be unmatched across the whole 29 team field) but it was a fun evening. The actual tournament started on Saturday with an 18 hole best ball Stableford scoring match. Fortunately, they were doing the standard Stableford scoring where there are no negative points. This would help us in the end :)
On the first day, I get off to a really slow start. The high point was hole 10 where I birdied the hole (hadn't ever done that before) which was a net eagle. 4 points! The low points were 4, 5, 8 and 17 where I had net double bogeys for 0 points. I had way too many holes where I tried to make up for a bad tee shot and ended up just digging myself into a hole. We ended the day with 34 points in 26th place out of 29 teams. Not very good.
For Sunday, my goal was to play safer after a bad tee shot. If I had a bad drive, get back into the fairway and keep plugging away at it. This strategy worked much better and while I still didn't play that well, I was able to salvage a point or two out of holes that I would have clearly blown the day before. The scoring for Sunday was different. Rather than best ball, we would count both scores so it could be twice as good, or just as bad, depending on how both players are doing. My putting started out terribly. For the first few holes, I couldn't sink anything. I would hit the green after two or three shots and then three putt to put myself out of the points. Terrible. When we got to hole 5, I muffed my second and third shots and hit the green lying 4 with a 24 foot downhill putt to save bogey. I tapped it and it rolled straight into the hole. I've never been so happy to hit a bogey, until the next hole when the same thing happened again. Each of these bogeys were net pars so I got 2 points for them. On 7, I had a net birdie and by the end of the front 9, we had a combined 31 points. Clearly better than the day before.
The back 9 wasn't as good, but we finished the day with 53 points for a two day total of 87 and in a tie for 18th out of 29. I would call that in the middle of the pack and I was quite satisfied with it. It is interesting when you play a tournament like this where you are not looking at your total score, just how you did on each hole. It isn't quite match play where each hole is a new game but it was was still fun.
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