Duer’s Ball Sleeps with the Worms

Week 12 – July 14, 2011

Preface
This GCCGL moment just goes to show you that no one is safe from mafia related activity even on a sleepy mid-west golf course. What happened to Nick Duer’s tee shot on this day was a travesty that hurt countless innocent folks including JJ’s broken foot (which may or may not have had anything to do with what happened to Duer).

[dc]W[/dc]eek 12 is in the books. It was a beautiful day and a perfect turnout once again. Three more subs filled in. The conditions were ripe for low scores and that is what we got this week. We had 75% of the net scores posted this week under par! That has to be a record. We’ll have to go deep into the statistical archives to see if that has ever happened before.

For the most part, week 12 started out uneventful but as the night grew long it started to gain some momentum. My group tee’d off last and included Ollie, Duer and Hausfeld. I have to admit, it was a pleasant round. Ollie was a formidable and gracious opponent. Watching Duer and Hausfeld duke it out was very entertaining. Both guys were on their game this week and it was educational for me to watch since those are two of the smoothest swings in this league. Speaking of Duer’s game, he scored a 42 but it should have been at least 2-3 strokes better than it was. A horrible tragedy occurred last night on hole #3, the short par 4 along the road. The group in front of us (Carrier, Moore, Metz, McLinn) were on the green. Duer steps up to the tee and ropes a liner down the right side of the fairway with a slight draw. Perfect. We knew it was going to be close to the green, a chip and a putt (possibly looking at a birdie). We all hit our second balls and Nick is still looking for his drive. Now we have all four of us combing the area like blood hounds sniffing for a dead body. It was nowhere to be found. We checked over the green thinking that it may have rolled off although we didn’t think it went that far. Nothing. We looked for around 10 – 15 minutes, I’m not exaggerating. Finally Duer takes a drop and now he’s looking at double-bogey after the drive of the night. Roll forward to Friday morning as Nick is recalling his game to a couple of fellow co-workers and stated that he could have even scored better if not for back-to-back doubles on holes 3 and 4. Joe Carrier was one of the co-workers listening to this story when a “ding” went off in his head and his ears perked up. A little angel poofed up near his right shoulder along with a little devil on his left. You see, Joe knew something, he knew that Nick’s ball actually wasn’t lost. The little angel was telling Joe, “Do the right thing here Joey…come clean”. The little devil hit the little angel over the head with a 6 iron and told Joe, “Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want Nick to do the same to you”. To Joe’s credit, he brushed off the little devil and gave a couple of Advil to the little angel and came clean. So he tells Nick that he made the green just as Donnie Golf Game was about to putt, his ball rolled past him and ended up on the fringe at the back of the green smack in the middle.  In honor of Nick hitting into them, Carrier recommended that Don stamp his ball into the ground.  Which he did.  They say a good portion of the ball was sticking out of the ground, but that is impossible. This thing had to be buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa! I’m telling you, we looked everywhere and we didn’t see anything.  As a matter of fact, I was putting my second shot from the area they said Nick’s ball should have been and I didn’t see anything. He could’ve been putting for eagle instead of double bogey! The lesson here boys and girls, never mess with a golfer’s balls…….golf balls.

The league suffered another injury this week. JJ was walking off hole number 7 and twisted his foot and ankle. The pain was bad enough that he basically played the rest of the round swinging with minimal lower body movement. I’m told it actually improved his accuracy!  JJ found out later that he broke his foot! Not sure of his status for the rest of the season. Let that be a lesson to all of you, do your stretches and eat right and hit the new GCC Renew room 3x a week and these sort of injuries can be avoided.

The Bloomhuff/Harris bet was won by Cletus. It wasn’t even close. There has been a changing of the guard this week. Sphincter Says What had another big week taking 25 points. They were led once again by a resurgent Metz who has revived his GCCGL career this season and took another 7.5 points. After a slow start they have climbed out of an early cellar into first place in front of the slumping Handi-Capped team who took another beating this week and managed only 16 points. They drop into second place. The Cletard Rollers also had a huge week winning 24 points. They were led by the Golf Angel who grabbed 7 points. The Heywoods move out of the basement into fourth place after taking 22 points while Gunga Galunga took a pounding scoring a measly 13 points and have slipped back into last place.

The winners of the low net were Joe Cook (A/B) for the second week in a row with a low net score of 33 and Matt McLinn and George Almeida (C/D) with low net scores of 32! Congratulations! Please stick around after the round next week as we draw the 2-man team matches coming up in two weeks. More information to come on that next week. We have a new statistic call Handicap Cards under the statistics section. This will show the HC card and what scores are being used in the HC calculation. We thought this might help folks decipher why their HC is what it is. Finally, we added a bunch of new pictures to the Photo Album courtesy of Big Donkey who takes some great pics and a few more new golf links in the Other Stuff section. Keep checking out GCCGL.com as we continue to add to the site on a regular basis during the season. Check out this week’s poll. We stay on the Willows front for one more week. Good luck to all and as always, hit ’em straight!

George Almeida, GCCGL Co-commissioner