Playing for the team, and an 'almost' round

Getting towards the end of the season now, so we're looking forward to the winter golf comps. I'm going to be playing with Roy, Eddie and son Peter again, so after my first full year of Saturday comps it will be nice to be a bit more relaxed about the game, I hope.

Last Wednesday I played my first game for the club, as part of the Notts Alliance. The Alliance has been going for over 100 years, and provides an opportunity for club players to compete among themselves and with professionals at courses around the county. It's limited to 16 handicap players or better, and you can be drawn to play alongside professionals from many Nottinghamshire clubs. Lee Westwood and Oliver Wilson, to name but two, have played in Aliance games. We played at Retford, a brute of a course off the back pots. Well, probably not so bad if you can hit the ball straight. It has some interesting tee shots though, through mature woodland, over hills, 270º doglegs and all. I felt as though I played OK, I parred all the par 3 holes, even the 219 yard one and the 180 yard off a precipice! Very easy to get in lots of trouble though, and I had an odd round of 3-pointers and blobs, ending up with 25 points. Normally that would be a disaster, but I discovered that apart from Tim Newham, our pro, I was joint top scorer. I even ended up level with one or two of the pros (OK, taking into account the extra 12 shots I got!). Tim won the entire event with 38 points, well done to him, but we ended up third from last in the team standings.

On Saturday, I almost had a fantastic round. 5 over for fifteen holes. What a shame there are 18 on the course. Two doubles and a TRIPLE pushed me to a gross 83, nett 69 and 23rd place. Still good, but could have been so much better. A poor approach on the 13th and a wayward tee shot on the 14th cost me four shots between them, and they were pretty much the only bad shots I played all day. Shame. Lost the 0.3 on my handicap to take me down to 14.0. I don't think there are enough games left this season to go up even if I have a shocking run in, so I'm likely to be 14 for the winter. Not that I'm complaining - if you'd told me when I started writing this that I would be down from 24 to 14 I would, as football managers say, have taken that.