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]     

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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]