Day 186 - Champions' Day

Today was the occasion of the Burhill Club Championships - both the main one, a 36 hole competition restricted to players with handicaps of 8 and below, and the Seniors version, this time with an age minimum of 50 and a handicap ceiling of 17.  I was signed up for the latter...

The youngsters teed off early at 7:30, whilst the older brethren had a more leisurely start to the day, wth tee times not until the middle of the day. Which sounded great...until we saw the weather forecast... The latter looked very gloomy as from around 12:45 when a ribbon of serious rain was scheduled to dump its contents onto those of us foolish enough to be out there.

We duly set off at 12:04 and, at about 12:06, the rain began. This, combined the fact that we had to wait on every shot right from the off, was not good: this is at least my excuse for the dismal start to my round. In fact, the rain cleared up by about the 5th hole, after which the sun came out and it was actually quite warm. My game, unlike the weather, did not improve and the only surprising thing was that I actually managed to record a score at all - one of my playing partners stopped counting on the 6th and, so we discovered later, he was far from the only one in the field who recorded a No Result for the day.

We all managed to complete the 18 holes however and thne met up withe all the other players on the Terrace to watch the final groups in the Club Championships come in. The sun was shining by now and there was a great atmosphere out there - all the more so when the final three-ball completed their round and we discovered that we had a tie: two players had logged scores of +5 for their combined rounds on the Old and New Courses.

Club Champion 2015

The playoff was scheduled to take place on the 18th hole of the New Course, right up to the watching public in front of the Clubhouse, and to be repeated as many times as necessary. As it turned out, just the one extra hole was enough to settle the issue; we have a new name on the Honours Board for 2015: Duncan Hodgson.

My job was to host the prize giving at the end of play, handing out trophies for the Club Champion and the Senior Champion, the latter receiving a prize for both best gross and best nett score.   The last such was the Ingram Flask, first awarded some 5 years ago to... Martin Lawrence....and I didn't even remember!