Men’s Golf Blog
Who could have imagined that running a couple of Club Stablefords in October would turn out to be a bust? At least the first time around the rain fell in advance of the day, and caused the course to be closed. With hindsight, that would have been preferable to the couple of hours of waterlogged misery we experienced before the course had to be closed! At least I had great company, joined by Roger Mountney and Claire Martin, and we did try to see the funny side when trying to find a spot to putt from on the 8th green that didn’t involve casual water.
October 31st should have been our last competition before changing over to the new World Handicap System, where much fun awaits us. If you never understood how the CSS was calculated previously, fear not, you no longer need to know that. Instead you can now puzzle over the Playing Conditions Calculation (PCC) which will adjust your Score Differential to better reflect your actual playing performance, a statistical procedure that is calculated automatically. Most of you will now have your new handicap indexes, and if you are like me, will be revisiting your murky playing past and bemoaning that several forgettable rounds have actually counted as among your best 8! I did notice that England Golf did not include my supplementary qualifying scores when determining my index, thus excluding the best round I’ve played in years, so do make sure you register with England Golf, check your scoring record, and report any errors or omissions to Tristan and Louis.
Not that we have much reason to contemplate our golf handicaps right now, or golf in any form, as we are subjected to a somewhat surreal lockdown by the masters of data and statistics at SAGE (did you know there are seven mathematicians among the SAGE members, aka the modelling group? Also a few medics, sociologists, economists, psychologists and political theorists. No Clinical immunologists though, but hey … ) So having planned a weekend of Foursomes Golf, in the form of the Arthur Clarke Foursomes Medal (playing for one of our oldest Club trophies) and a Winter Foursomes Knockout match, for last weekend, with especially beautiful weather on the Saturday, aimless walking and cycling was all that was allowed. I’m reliably informed that there were huge numbers of people in Richmond Park as a consequence.
Still, we can have our dry cleaning done, buy DIY materials, buy plants from the garden centre, and so on, but the entire hospitality sector has been closed for business, including our Club. We can walk around Richmond Park in a group of six, but cannot play golf in a group of four, or even play singles tennis, wow. To keep our golfing blues at bay we have the US Masters coming up this weekend. I’m hoping to see Shane Lowry in contention and await with interest to see Bryson DeChambeau bring his power game to Augusta, though I believe he won’t use the 48″ driver this time, sadly!
Best wishes to all,
Gerry Dennigan | Men’s Golf Captain