The dramas of a shootout final

By Paul Gueorgieff

My golf club held it's annual shootout final last month.

It is easily the club's most dramatic tournament of the year.

For starters, it's a season-long event with only 11 players making the final. Scores can be submitted every Saturday and Sunday from about February to November. In other words you could enter about 100 times, paying $2 for each entry.

Clearly no one plays in every round but at $2 a time, a sizeable pot mounts up for the shootout final.

The players with the highest stableford points from eight rounds make the final field of 11. In the final few weeks there is much desperation from those hovering around the 11th qualifier mark.

But that is only the beginning of the drama. The shootout final has all participants on edge as the competition gets underway.

What makes the final so dramatic is that one player has to lose on every hole.

The player with the worst nett score is eliminated and no one wants to depart the contest on the opening hole, after months of build-up.

But someone must lose and in my years of playing the tournament there have been some bizarre incidents.

Our first hole is not long but there are trees left and right, a creek running diagonally across the fairway and the green is bunkered left and right. Consequently there has been scores as high as 13 and another time the highest nett score was just five.

When there is more than one player with the highest nett score a playoff is required to determine who departs the contest.

The playoff is decided by the tournament supervisor and it is usually a chip or a putt. The person with the worst chip or worst putt loses. A matter of inches can often be the difference and the loser departs the contest much like a losing contestant on television's quiz programme The Weakest Link. You are the weakest link. Goodbye.

The tension is high throughout the shootout final and four-putts, flubbed chips and wild drives are par for the course.

I was involved in a chip-off on the seventh hole in our tournament last month.

I went first and my chip didn't even make the green. I nearly went and picked up my ball to concede the chip-off to my opponent.

Lucky I didn't. My opponent's chip was worse and I survived another hole.

Another bizarre incident a year or so ago, a player picked up his ball on the second-last green when he thought he couldn't equal his two opponents.

The player had forgotten he got a shot on the hole. He didn't normally get a shot on the hole but the player’s handicap had recently gone out to allow him a shot.

Another time a player hit the wrong ball. Hard to believe considering most of the players have caddies and there are other people watching the event. But it happened.

For the winner of last month’s shootout final last it was a case of redemption.

The previous year he posted a score of 13 on the seventh hole when he topped his tee shot, topped his next shot, topped his next shot, topped his next shot and topped his next shot. Yes, disaster.

But his win last month didn't go without yet more drama. He missed a short putt on the final hole to secure victory and a chip-off was required to determine the winner.

Both players hit good chips and it was only a matter of inches that decided victory.

I’m already looking forward to next year's shootout.