Day 87 - Senior Golfers' Society

You have probably never heard of the Senior Golfers' Society, and there is no reason why you should have. They have their own website which tells you a little about their history, but not a great deal about their present. Indeed it is one of the slimmest website I have ever seen, with everything of interest hidden behind a password protected log-in screen.

If I understand it correctly, it is a Society to which you have to be invited to join and, even then, your application is put into a secret ballot and, if you haven't been successful after 6 years, your request to join is politely denied.

And why would you even want to join them: the answer is because they have a golf fixture list to die for, playing matches essentially every weekday from April to August at some, if not all, of the top clubs in the country. One proviso though: all matches are foursomes as this is the only format they play.

Why all of this history lesson? Because I played today in the Away leg of our annual fixture with said Society.  The location was Woking Golf Club, which they use as their "home" course. This is a cracking heathland course, one of the three Ws with West Hill and Worplesden, and it is always a treat to play there. All the more so today, when we had our first day for eons with only a mild breeze as opposed to the tornadoes of recent weeks.

The format was 36 holes of foursomes, with a splendid lunch to break up play and fuel everyone for their afternoon rounds. My morning partner and I struggled to cope with the large greens and, before we knew what had happened, we found ourselves 5 holes down.  We managed gradually to claw our way back to only 1 down on the 18th, needing to win that to halve the match...  We thought we had achieved this, but one of our opponents produced his first long putt of the day and snuffed out that flicker of expectation.

The round in the afternoon also got off to a poor start, though this time we only found ourselves 2 down. Here too we managed to reel the opposition in, standing on the 18th tee again 1 down, but this time the golfing gods were with us: their second shot disappeared into the laurel bushes behind the green. This meant that we halved the match and indeed overall the result was also halved 5-5.  Everything to play for in the return match at Burhill in July!