Notes From The “Tin Cup”
Underground- The Marquee Match-Up-The Battle Of The Titans
By Si Lannon
[I have mentioned on
more than one occasion that although sports, sports media, sports mania are a
large representation of the American historical experience and therefore worthy
of some note that generally we have tried to shy away from that subject on this
site. Shied away understanding that there is no dearth of material on the
subject elsewhere and certainly in the mass media. Occasionally we have
reviewed the work of literary sportswriters, or literary figures who have
written about sports like Damon Runyon (horse-racing) and Ring Lardner
(baseball, especially the classic American summer pastime You Know Me, Al series)
but that had much more to do with character development, mood and backdrop. The
one serious attempt several years ago to have the well-known college game
handicapper Shelly Newman cover a few college football seasons were sort of
preempted once the NCAAA gurus finally adopted a semi-playoff format and took
some of the fun, according to Shelly, out of weekly picking what he thought
were the top 25 college football teams (and with it the all-important betting
point spread). Given the formulas for inclusion in the Final Four selected at
the end of the season the whole thing was weighted toward leagues with
play-offs and many good teams like the SEC and Big Ten a lot of the suspense
evaporated. (The SEC’s Alabama who have had a virtual lock on the mystical
national title the past several years also dampened Shelly’s ardor for meeting
those weekly deadlines inherent in covering such a diffuse cluster of games-and
point spreads.)
Earlier this year Si
Lannon, who otherwise is a pretty solid citizen and good reviewer of books and
films here and at the American Film
Gazette, proposed to do a few pieces on golf. It turned out beneath that
solid exterior and calm demeanor was a maniac for playing this arcane and
time-consuming game with its fistful of rules which don’t make sense to the
average layperson, at least to me when I tried to get a handle on why Si would
get up at five in the morning to play at six on weekends when the rest of the
world was either just going to bed or had a few hours left before hitting the
skids. So yes Si is an avid fan and devotee of hitting small dimpled white
balls with funny logos who never did anybody any harm into lakes, ponds, trees,
sand traps and other devilish locations as far as I know. Each calumny with its
own set of penalties and procedures for getting the ball back in play and down
to the goal-to the green-in order to put that little white ball into a man-made
hole, the old tin cup he called it, in finely trimmed and contoured grass that
also never hurt anybody.
Now Si is a guy who does
not ask many favors and so against my better judgement I let him do a short
piece on the subject. His choice was not some big time tournament like the U.S.
Open which I might have appreciated some coverage on. Just to get a feel for
who plays this game at the highest level these days when even I know that the
well-advertised Tiger Woods no longer is the king of the hill of the sport. No,
his choice a local, local to him, amateur golf tournament at his golf club,
Frog Pond Golf Course, where he wanted to cover something called the club net
four-ball club championship. Si can explain exactly what that format is for the
clueless which included me until he told me about what that meant in the golf
world vocabulary which apparently hasn’t changed since about the time of golf
fanatic Charles I in England. Before he lost his head. (Not over golf but
weightier matters like the “divine right of kings” idea he was working under
and for which he paid with his life).
It seems some of his regular
six in the morning golf partners (so immediately suspect in my book since this
reeked of some sort of sect or cult like Druids or Maypole denizens which I
made clear to him) were involved in the tournament and so he had a rooting
interest in the play. He moreover had predicted that the two two-person teams
(therefore four-ball since each participant flails his own ball) which he
friends had partnered in had reached the finals of the championship and would
be slated to go head to head on in that final. Si begged, well, asked if he
could a follow up on that first article to finish up in style. I was skeptical
but told him to cover the “event” and write something up and if I liked it I
would make sure it was posted. I did and here it is but I hope this satisfies
Si’s golf craziness and he gets back to writing real film and book stuff about
the American saga-Pete Markin]
****
A Note From Si Lannon
[As my editor Pete
Markin mentioned in his introduction to this piece, an introduction that may
turn out to have been as long as this piece itself, I will explain, roughly
explain, what the format for this net four-ball tournament is about which even
he, a non-believer, could understand under constant repetition. Mercifully,
mercifully to me as well as the average reader who knows of my film and book
reviews, I will not except in spots discuss the arcane rules that govern
seemingly every conceivable situation in golf here but just the outlines for
the clueless and curious. Most readers may know about the high end of the
sport, the pros, the PGA, or have seen major tournaments like the Masters or
U.S. Open on television almost all of which are four day affairs in which the
golfer with the lowest score for the four days wins (and these days wins a ton
of money). But that is the elite, the top. The top players in an average golf
club who in any case are far below that elite level are not plentiful enough to
have such a tournament based on straight up stroke play. The spread between
abilities is too great to make such competition fair so other formats have been
created for those who want to compete against other golfers at the club level.
Hence the annual club net team four-ball championship which I am covering in
this piece.
This way this type of
tournament plays out is that as many interested two-person teams who enter play
a qualifying round in order to reduce the field to sixteen teams. That
qualifying round is based on the sixteen lowest team scores of best-ball golf.
Best ball is based on handicaps. (This is where I lost Pete Markin and was the source
of much repetition as he was incredulous about the whole system.) For example
if both team members get a five on a hole which is a par four then then would
be one over par on their gross score. But if one (or either) player has a
handicap stroke on that hole then they would have a net score of four-par. That
is the score that counts and so on through the eighteen holes of golf which
constitute a round. Handicaps are based on the premise that two people with
different abilities could play each other on a relatively equal playing field
if the better golfer gave the other golfer some strokes to give that person a
fighting chance of winning. Handicaps are based on a complicated formula of the
average of several recent rounds of golf and I need not go further than that
for an explanation.
The sixteen qualifying teams
then play elimination rounds to get a champion. In the first round (what in
NCAA basketball championships would be the “sweet sixteen”) the top eight
ranked teams play the lower eight teams in reverse order. For example the
lowest qualifying team number one plays the highest qualifying team number
sixteen and so on. The surviving eight then play a second round (the NCAA elite
eight), the surviving four (the NCAA Final Four)a third round and the last two
teams standing play a fourth round for the championship. This is where the
vagaries of the format came into play when I predicted my friends the teams of
Frenchie Robert and Caz Casey and Sand-Bagger Jackson and Kenny Lou would as
they actually did do meet in the finals. The former team had been the top seed
and the latter team number ten. If the Jackson-Lou team had been seeded eighth
or less then no way could the two teams meet in the finals since they would
play each other in an earlier round. As it turned out each pair fairly easily
went through their earlier rounds so the final would provide bragging rights
and side bet cash for the winning team for the rest of the season-and maybe
beyond.
The final as it turned
out was held on a granite gray late September morning and the two pairs, Frenchie
and Caz, Sand-Bagger and Kenny seemed to be primed to do battle, to do the
clash of titans as advertised in the headline.
To give a little color to the proceedings I should mention that
Frenchie, the redoubtable Frenchman a generation out of Quebec is the best
golfer of the four and intensely competitive ( best meaning he has the lowest
handicap which means that he got no stokes to help him against the other guys).
Caz is a wily Irishman who has now safely gotten his brood of kids past the
college albatross around his neck had only taken up the game the previous
couple of years and so had the highest handicap (meaning he gets more strokes
on certain holes than the others which could help his teammate considerable if
he played well-which he did). This team was considered by the assorted touts
hanging in the clubhouse bar the “young upstarts” since they had only been
playing as a team for a couple of years and had not won a major championship. Sand-Bagger
as his designation indicates is an old geezer, older than me, who has been
playing in these events seemingly forever and is always grousing about how he
should have more strokes (as he takes our money at the end of the golf round
more often than not). Kenny is a diminutive Chinese who can be the best player in
the world one day and a rank amateur the next. When this pair is on though it
is like a perfect storm. Around the clubhouse bar, among those gadflys and barflies
who populate every club not a few who have fallen under the wheel to this
tandem, they are the “veterans” as their names on various plaques testify to.
So this one set up as a David and Goliath affair.
This is the way Jack
Jones, the Frog Pond gadfly and barfly-in-chief put it tongue in cheek in a
memo tacked onto the message board in the club’s men’s locker room:
“The Moon is in the
Seventh House. The usually sleepy hamlet of Huron Village will be inundated
with a motley crew of people and vehicles early tomorrow morning after
procuring the hottest ticket in town for the improbable match-up of the upstart
newcomers the redoubtable, whatever that means, Frenchie Roberts the brash
transport from up Quebec way and his erstwhile partner the mysteriously named
Caz Casey against the rags to riches bloodied and hardscrabble veterans
Sand-Bagger Jackson and his wily long-time partner Kenny Lou for the coveted
Frog Pond Four-Ball Net Championship.
“Upon hearing of the
pairing after Frenchie and Caz had vanquished their third round opponents while
travelling back to his hometown to pick up his recalcitrant high school son, recalcitrant
since despite constant pleading the young man has taken up the much more
civilized sport of tennis, the mercurial Mr. Lou when the AP caught to him
simply stated “We will take no prisoners.”
“The more sagacious
Sand-Bagger has been quoted by Reuters as saying-“We are just happy to be in
the tournament after last year’s failure to qualify and look forward to facing
this unknown pair of upstarts for the biggest prize of all. We are pleased to be
able to be pitted against a couple of young up and coming players who will give
us all we can handle although the fate sisters would seem to favor that long
hitting pair. It will take everything we know to have a chance against these
stroke-strewn opponents. We will just play one hole at a time and see what
happens”
“More to the point
Sand-Bagger was quoted as saying that he and Mr. Lou had won many championships
and much prize money but that the really important thing was to win that side
bet of one hundred dollars per man for bragging rights the rest of the
season.”
And it was as advertised
a battle royal as both teams brought “game” to the vaunted showdown. I won’t
bore regular readers with the play by play, hole by hole details except to say
from personal experience tensions ran high on the first tee box even against long-time
buddies, maybe especially against longtime buddies, and continued throughout
the match as emotions ran up and down depending on the results of each hole
until the end somewhere on the course hopefully not before the regulation
eighteenth hole. Frenchie and Caz came out strong based on Caz playing out of
his shoes that day. They were soon two holes up meaning they had won two more
than their opponent (although that two up lead would be their highest lead of
the day as Sand-Bagger and Kenny battled back to “stop the bleeding,” allow the
young upstarts to get no further up on them). But the day belonged to the
veterans on Kenny playing way out of his shoes although they did not seal the
deal until the eighteenth hole when Kenny sank a ten foot birdie putt to end
the game. Based on the level of play that day Sand-Bagger and Kenny had had
their second lowest collective score ever. And Frenchie and Caz were only one
stroke more. So yeah, as Sand-Bagger said in jest as they were waiting to tee off
on the first tee this was a “friendly game to the death.” Enough said.
[In the interest of full
disclosure the reason I was able to cover this event was that my teammate, Rags
Johnson, and I failed to qualify-did not make the cut a subject we will hear no
end of from this year’s finalists. We had actually won this same tournament last
year which also shows the vagaries of golf-Si Lannon]
