Great Friends Equals Great Golf!

Posted Jul 29 2010, 12:39 PM by Cathy Erickson
It has been a busy few weeks in my world outside of golf and I feel like I'm going through withdrawals.  But a big work presentation is over and now I can think about golf again!  Yippee!!  But what's been on my mind lately were a couple of great golf days earlier this month...
 
Our annual golf scramble was a huge success!  The weather was perfect, the golf course was full, over 100 gift certificates were given out, and my water bottles made it with 15 minutes to spare! (Thank You FedEx!!)  There is a lot I love about this day - it's my way of providing a day to give back to our golf course and to have an opportunity for more than 150 golfers to have a fun day.

Of course, for some of us, there is a little something about winning that's in the back of our minds, too.  For the past 3 years my team of great golf pals and I have not been able to stand on the winner's podium...we've either struggled with our putting or had a hard time getting our approach shots close to the pin.  Either way, we were on the outside looking in at our other golf friends who have taken the title since 2007.  We were ready to put up a great score this year, but it was a comment by our rival team's guys..."you make a good 2nd place team"...that made us all just a little more determined bring our best game.
 
Just before teeing off I had a thought...sometimes in scrambles we are our own worst enemy - trying to "make a shot happen" or maybe swinging out of our shoes instead of just playing our game.  So I thought that if we had a little competition within our own team we would be able to bring out our best shots...so I proposed to the team that for every approach shot, the person who got the closest got a point, and at the end of the round whoever had the most points won our "wager".  Being the competitive types, my boys loved the idea, and before we were ready to hit our first shots, we had already changed up the rules to include putts and cancelling points.  This was going to be a fun round!
 
First hole, point for me!!  I'm already loving this game.  But soon enough we were all throwing darts at the pins and giving ourselves great birdie chances on almost every hole.  There were some hilarious moments when someone would get just inside of what we thought was already a great shot - points were hard to come by!  We also hit all of the par-5's in 2 and made eagle on 2 of the 3!  Our only struggle were the par-3's  - we left ourselves with longer putts and the best we could do was burn the edge, so no birdies on our 3 par-3's!  Ouch.  The 2 eagles made up for it though and we ended up -17 for the day and a 3 shot victory!
 
Our point game was tight to the last hole, too - DY had 5 points and 3 of us had 4 points and one had 3, so there was still a chance to tie...our approach shot to the par-4 9th hole was about 60 yards, and I can't tell you how happy I was that I had hit about 75 60-yard wedge shots just a few days before as practice!  I was 2nd to hit and I ended up about 6ft away so I had to wait for 3 other guys before knowing if I could tie!  It was close, but it was me!  I think our point scores were a testament that we all contributed shots all day long.  (And Jason & Casey, I forgive you for cancelling my putts!)
 
It was funny, because of my own internal competitiveness and side game, I didn't even realize how great we shot until the round was over.  To me, that was the real success of the day - we played some great golf because we wanted to beat each other!  (side bar: I just wanted to once again thank everyone who played that day, my great friends for volunteering, and especially to my team who once again made this my favorite golf day of the year - thanks JJ for keeping track of all my "stuff"! ...virtual hugs!)
 
My other golf highlight in the past few weeks was getting the opportunity to play in a scramble with 3 great women.  Deb, Judy, Joan and I played in a Hot Ball scramble with about 12 other teams.  The format is, everyone tees off and one person has to be the "hot ball"...that person plays the hole by themselves and other three scramble whichever other drive they want.  Handicaps mattered, so there was definitely strategy involved in picking the right hot ball player, because sometimes one of us would get a stroke on certain holes.  I really liked that there was thinking involved!
 
For whatever reason, my putter decided to get hot that day - and we were able to card quite a few birdies on our scramble ball and we did quite well on our hot ball, too!  Although I'll admit my hot balls STUNK!  But thankfully I got strokes on a couple of them.  Judy was definitely our Hot Ball VIP!  She came through when we needed her.
 
Deb and Joan were solid all day long and Joan's competitive spirit was contagious!  It was the BEST day!!  I wasn't sure if we would have a chance to win with some teams having a lot of handicap to work with, but in the end we were the winners...and I couldn't have been more thankful to have been asked to play that day.
 
As I'm reflecting on these great 2 days, I'm remembering that Sam Johnson isn't a fan of scrambles...I remember a post of his and I'm recalling that he did have some valid points...but you know what, I still love them!!    That's why I started Scramble Tuesdays at our golf course!!
 
I'm looking forward to playing in a few more events this summer, but mostly I just love playing golf with great friends.  I hope you get the chance, too.

Filed under: competition, scramble, friends, Golf, Cathy Erickson, hot ball