13 Annual Pinehurst Golf Weekend - 2013 Edition

Before, I get to the golf.  I wanted to give LA a big shout out for being an awesome wife and mother by taking care of our kids while I went out of town.  I cut the trip a day short because it was Father's Day on Sunday.  I didn't want to not be home to celebrate with LA and the kids.

We left Thursday evening and our navigator (Mike) gave our pilot (Tim) the full weather report before we left.  Mike has not been North of mile marker 189 since our trip last year to Pinehurst - that's another long story.  Tim wasn't worried about the weather as much as if the "Hot and Now" sign was going to be on when we got to Florence.  That's what I like a man with his priorities in order.  The "Hot and Now" light wasn't on when we got there but they had some fresh ones that were still warm.  We eventually drove through the teeth of the storm somewhere in NC and met up with the rest of the group at a sports bar to catch the last quarter of the NBA finals.  We knew where the sports bar was but when the lights on the outside are off and all you see as you pass the entrance was a few flickering tv screens it made it a little harder to find.  We soon found out the lights were off because the power was off due to the storm and had been off since around 6:30pm.  We also learned that the power was also out at the condos.  When we got to the condos around 11:30 the power was still off.  The good news was that the storm had cooled off the temps by about 20 degrees and while not a meat locker it was bearable. We figured that the power would come on at some point during the night.  We figured wrong.  The power didn't come back on until around 7:00am.  The biggest tragedy was after the power came back on the cable tv didn't.  Want to talk about roughing it for a few days.  Try keeping your TV off for two days...We felt like  we were going through detox and were trying to use our phones to keep up to date on the US Open and Sportscenter.  Most of rual NC doesn't have enough G's for your smartphone to work at the speed you are used to in the greater Charleston area.  I am pretty sure Fred Flintstone was  hammering out the news we were attempting to get.  Anyway, enough about the tragic life we lead when we don't have power and our smartphones aren't so smart...the good news is we survived and were able to play golf (something that didn't require power) which is what we came to do.

This was our 13th year and we are down to Alex as being the only person to make all 13 years.  Which makes sense because he organizes the event every year.

We played our typical first round at Tobacco Road which is much nicer on Friday than on Sunday.  I still love this course.  It is difficult but for whatever reason I typically play my best round of the weekend there.

Tobacco Road

• 87th Golf Digest Public Links Courses 2013-2014
• 23rd Best Golf Course in NC
• Our Life Top Ten Golf Courses I've Played
• Home to the best Bar-B-Que Sandwich - I was actually looking forward to the sandwich as much as the course.

You can read some other facts about the course from last years post here.

Here's a link to an overview of the course.  At the bottom it has a Google Earth flyover all the holes (I attempted put the flyover embedded in the blog but it changed the backgroud color and caused the post not to meet my standards of what I want to deliver to my readers).  It is not the greatest clarity and difficult to get the true feel of the elevation changes but different (something I had never seen done before and that's what we are about at Our Life - cutting edge technology).

I am sure you just dying to know what I shot - 90 with a big fat 9 on number 18. I was pleased with the round except of number 18.   I had 85 in the sights and let a terrible sand wedge from 90 yards out. I wish I had that shot back - Leroy hit one to about 15 feet - typical. I am filing a petition with the PGA to let me and Leroy on the tour. 

Seven Lakes

Seven Lakes was home to our Saturday round of golf. We had played this course before but it wasn't until arriving that I remembered the course and some of the layout. It is 180 degrees from Tobacco Road (which in all honesty, every course is 180 degrees from Tobacco Road). The course should be called "The Bridges of Madison County" (go to their home page - www.sevenlakescountryclub.com and watch the pictures rotate) because they have a couple of bridges with covers on them. It is a traditional layout with lots of elevated greens and all the greens are pretty small. Not as much margin for error as Tobacco Road offers and this course has out of bounds (the white stakes - stoke and distance penalty) that Tobacco Road doesn't have. You will need to keep it in the fairway and your approach shots are a premium if you want to score. If you are a NASCAR golfer, always hitting it left (hook), you might not like the course as much. The majority of the holes are straight or dogleg rights.  It has received a couple of accolades:

• Sandhills Golf Association Course of the Year 2010, 2011, 2012 
• Golf Digest "plan your travel around it" I am not sure I would plan my travel around it but if you looking for a place to play and have some time in your golf schedule then check it out.

I shot a disappointing 91 with a blow up on 3 holes on the backside to ruin a decent round (triple, double, double).  I was happy that I was able to recover and not let those three holes lead to six bad holes.

Sidebar: We played an additional nine holes (late afternoon, 3:30 or so) as two man teams which is always interesting and since we had 10, we went off as a foursome and sixsome. We are amateurs in our golf game but understand golf course etiquette. If a group caught us we were going to let them play through..no big deal or so we thought. While teeing off on number 4,a par four, a twosome caught us and while they were on the green we told them to go ahead and tee off when they were ready, we would be watching for them. So knucklehead one and two tee off and then both hit terrible second shots.  Instead of playing the hole out they decided to pick up and not finish the hole (I guess the gallery was too much for them).  While passing the green they made a couple of comments about us playing as six and us needing to split into two groups because there were lots of other people behind them...we were nice and said okay (knowing we weren't going to split up). After all six of us, reached the green and putted, who was still on the next hole green.  Our sixsome caught their twosome.  We then teed off on the par 3 when another twosome (father and son) approached the box. We allowed them to hit and they decided to pickup also and not putt (I don't think we are think intimidating). They thanked us and we continued on our marry way.  No one else caught us, evidently knucklehead one and two didn't know what they were talking about.  After we finished teeing off on number 11(first picture on their home page), as we were exiting one of the bridges of madison county we are greeted by a grumpy old man who power stops his cart just before t-boning one of our carts.  He then proceeds to lay into us about playing as a sixsome, holding up other golfers, not letting anyone play through (then how did they get ahead of us) and that we were cursing at knucklehead one and two.  It seems knucklehead one and two had called in to report us and was arriving to save the day (seven holes later).  He continued his rant and told us that this was a private course (more on that in a minute after I finish the story). We proceeded to tell grumpy old man that it didn't go down like knucklehead one and two described and we did not curse at them and told him the whole story...He called the club and was able to verify with the father and son that we were the most polite southern gentlemen they had ever encountered on the golf course. Grumpy Old Man then all of a sudden became our friend and he wanted to know about the knucklehead one and two. We described them as older men, "how old" he asked and we said late 50s and he then gave us the one finger salute, followed by "that's how old I am, assholes" (which he said laughing). He departed and we finished up our last hole which was 11 because you get two extra holes since the course layout doesn't take you back to the clubhouse after nine. So grumpy old man called Seven Lakes a private course which I disagreed. If it was private, we would not be playing on it. You can't take money to play the course from a bunch of traveling golf vagabonds and call yourself a private course. If you want to be private then raise your membership dues and don't allow non members to play without members. Until then you are a public course, if you want a fancy name call yourself -semi-private.

Our Sunday Round was scheduled for The National but I elected not to participate as mentioned earlier. I hope we get to go back there. It looks outstanding. I am waiting on the review from a couple of guys that played it.

Here a quick review on the dining for the weekend:

• Stop in at Tobacco Road and get a BBQ sandwich 
• Friday night we went to The Bell Tree Tavern  - the service was good and the food was pretty good about what you would expect.  It's not five star but you don't go there for 5 star dining.

Based on my frequency of playing golf, I should store the clubs until around October.

Real Quickly:  I wanted to share two highlights from the US Open.  It is Shawn Stefani's Hole In One.  Take a look at it in case you missed it:

The other is Carl Pettersson's attempt to hit his ball in the fairway, when this happens:

I wanted to share both of these because both of the are improbable.

(From Huffington Post) Stefani's 1 was the first-ever ace in a U.S. Open played at Merion, per Doug Shedloskiof Golf World. According to USGA historian Mike Trostel, it was also the 43rd known ace in U.S. Open history, via Doug Ferguson of The Associated Press.

A typical golfer have odds of 1 in 12,500 to hit a hole in one (guess I haven't played 12,500 rounds yet), for a professional golfer the odds are 1 in 2,500.  I am putting the odds of Shawn Stefani's even greater because it was the US Open and how it happened because let's be honest, he didn't mean to hit it there.  The fact it hit so far from the hole (not even on the green and went in is unbelievable to me).  I bet he would struggle to chip in or make a putt from where his ball hit.  

I am asking our staff statistician and all around numbers guru - Jeremy to get to work on the odds of what happened to Carl Pettersson.  I have seen and witnessed balls hitting each other on the green, unusual yes, normal no and I even have seen balls from players playing the same hole hit each other in the fairway.  However, I have never seen a ball from another hole hit another ball AND I have never seen a player already starting his downswing at the ball and it be hit by another ball from a different fairway.    What boggles my mind on this is that there is so much fairway (Carl's fairway and the entire fairway the other guy missed) available for the ball to go and it directly hits another ball.  Now add in the odds that someone has actually started the process of hitting one of the balls. I guess since it happened, it can happen again.  I am unscientifically putting the odds at 1 in 2,000,000.  I'll let you know what Jeremy comes up with...stay tuned