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September 02, 2005
World Amateur Championship of Golf -Final Day
Yesterday's final round didn't turn out to be any less challenging than the first three. With the world's largest golf tournament being contested across 75 courses in the Myrtle Beach area, each flight has an opportunity to play some of the better courses in the area, along with one or two of the less desirable. Sea Gull golf club was definately one of the less desirable, described by a local as "an 18 hole cow pasture surrounded by out-of-bounds on both sides of every hole." I must say I agree with that description. As the head pro welcomed us and announced all the local rules, he also pointed out the fact that we would be the last group of golfers to ever experience this old course, as the following day the bull-dozers were coming in to conduct a $7 Million renovation that will transform this land into the new Pawleys Island Golf Club scheduled to reopen in late 2006.
Yesterday's final round saw a rough start for all four of us. Bob (one of our flight leaders until that point) and Ned from Philadelphia both posted 9's & 10's on the opening par 4, while Byron from Minneapolis dropped a birdie putt and I quietly walked away with a happy bogey. I three-putted the next green for a dissappointing double. Then I finally got snagged on the third hole... my decent tee shot took a bad bounce into a water hazard. Then my third shot took an unlucky bounce to a point less than two feet beyond the left O/B line... back to the point of my prior shot dropping four / hitting five. Found myself short-sided off-the-back two shots later, then two-putted for a quintuple-bogie 9... 8 over after the first three holes! Then on the next hole, Byron, who had a pretty good start, set the new high score for our group with an 11 on an easy par 5! I quickly learned that the strategy on this course is simple - SHORT & STRAIGHT! My driver never came out of the bag the rest of the day, and I managed to plog along with pars and bogies the rest of the round to salvage a respectable 93. Never was I so happy to watch the final putt drop on the 72nd hole... what a grind! I have a newfound respect for players on tour who do this for a living. They definately earn their keep!
Final results for 72 holes... 372 strokes (94/96/89/93), placing me alone in 49th place (gross) out of 89 in my flight. Our young friend Jeremy from Massachusetts did manage to win our flight with a 72-hole total of 336 (85/82/86/83), and will be competing in the championship round today with the 44 other flight winners to determine an overall world champion. Meanwhile, we crunched some fun numbers this morning to see where our net scores stacked up overall. While it's not apples-to-apples because all the flights were contested across different course, we calculated that my net 316 placed me in a 68-way tie for 1,934th place out of 3,061 men whose final results were available so far (two flights have yet to report because of rules discrepencies). Al's 344 net placed him in a 22-way tie for 2,636th.
All in all, a very well run tournament with lots of great people. I can honostly say I never came across a single sandbagger or rules violater the entire week, and met a lot of great folks I will certain to come across again in the future. Now the three of us are headed over to Barefoot for a non-competitive round on the Fazio course there. Then I'm off on a flight up to northern Virginia this evening to spend the Labor Day weekend with friends and family in that area before returning to Colorado on Monday.
However, the competitive golf is not quite over for the weekend. I had already registered for a one-day Michelob Ultra Tour event (the tour I have been competing in since last spring) at the Stonewall Golf Club on Lake Manassas tomorrow. I learned via e-mail this week that Colorado will indeed be fielding a team for the Ryder Cup style Sir Alfred Cup at the national championships in Orlando in October (I had already qualified for and plan to attend the national stroke-play event), and I have received an invitation to be one of two players representing Colorado's Sarazan flight on their 12-member team. As it turns out, tomorrow's event at Stonewall is the final qualifier to determine who will be representing the northern Virginia team on the Sir Alfred Cup. So in all likelihood, the folks I will be playing against tomorrow will be some of the same folks I will be facing at the nationals!
That's it from Myrtle Beach. I am certain to be back next year, and from the sounds of some of the replies from e-mails I have received this week, I expect that we will end up with a much larger group, hopefully including some more international competitors, for next year as well.
- Bill
Posted by efullerton at September 2, 2005 09:52 AM
