Today was the first full day of the Plateau Club Member/Guest tournament. OK, actually, yesterday was because there was a practice round and the kickoff horse race. Paul and I are playing together this year and Rick is playing with the other Rick. Yesterday, I was playing much like I've played for the past couple of months. Some great holes and some terrible ones. I did end up with 4 pars, 8 bogies and one birdie (on 7) but I also had 3 doubles and 2 triples so inconsistency was the name of the game. Since the format for the actual tournament is team best ball match play, though that is not bad. If Paul can play well on the holes where I fall apart, we would be in good shape. We win one point for each hole we win, 1/2 point for each hole we split and the winner of the match gets one extra point for a total of 10 possible points per 9 hole round.
So this morning around 9 am, Paul and I teed off. We are the top seed in the second flight, thanks to Paul's 5 course handicap. Mine would be around 17 or so but since the max differential is 10, I am playing to a 15. Since we are the top seed and Paul has the lowest handicap in our flight of 6 teams, everyone's handicap will be relative to Paul's which means that I always get 5 strokes per 9 hole round. This is great to know from a consistency point of view. Getting a stroke on the first hole ended up helping a lot as I finished with a net par to win that first hole. Paul then won the second hole with a natural birdie (his first of 5 today!). I had a natural birdie (net eagle) on 3, then Paul won 4 with another birdie. After I won 5 with a par, we were looking sweet. We had already won the first match swapping winning holes (I liked the idea that I would win the odd holes and he would win the even ones). It didn't keep up like that -- which is good because I think people would want to kill us.
The amazing thing was that we ended up winning all three matches we played today. 7.5 points on the first round and 6 points each for the second and third rounds so at the end of day one, we are leading our flight by 2 points. A lot can happen tomorrow and who knows if we will be hitting the ball as well tomorrow as we did today but it is really amazing to be leading at the end of day one.
Paul and I finished our 3rd round and as we came in, the head pro, Chris, came over to us. "Hey," he said, "did you hear about Rick's hole in one?"
Huh?!?!?
Yep, Rick had a hole in one on 15. His third hole in one in 3 years. In fact, all three of them have been in the month of July. When Paul and I were playing 15 today, about an hour before Rick hit his shot, we were telling the guys we were playing against that Rick had hit one in July for each of the last 2 years and was due. We actually said that we figured he would hit one during the tournament and sure enough, he did. DAMN! I figure that we set up the mojo by letting the 15th hole to be on the lookout for him. In return, we got a couple of free drinks in the bar after the round (along with everyone else in the tournament). Congrats Rick!
So the final rounds are tomorrow, two more 9 hole matches. Then the winner of each flight plays in a Championship Horse Race. I would LOVE to do that, but I am not worrying about that at all at this point. There is a lot of golf to play and it was just so great today to play as well as we did. Lots of fun.
More tomorrow :)
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