Scramble brings out the very best

To win any golf competition, a golfer or team needs to be at their best, but this year players have to go to extreme efforts of brilliance to try and get their team into the mix for Regional Finals.

This year, there has been an unprecedented amount of reports of extraordinary shots being holed by players under all sorts of conditions and pressure.

We start at the event at Donnybrook, in the Bunbury area out West. You would expect players to warm up, ease their way into it and then really attack the flag when they have really got their game going, but not Bruce Thompson. He put his best foot forward on the first hole by popping it straight in the cup with his first shot of the day to get his team off to a flyer.

It would appear other scrambles must have heard about what was required to take the chocolates this year, because an extraordinary shot was reported at the Scramble in Busselton, just south of Bunbury. The reports were, all teams were either in the club house or on their final hole with the top three teams going through to the Regional.

One particular team had played well that day, but knew they were a couple of shots off it with their final hole, a par 4, to go. They had nominated a decent drive on their final hole but had resigned themselves to a solid top 10 performance and had their eye on that first beer back in the clubhouse. Well cometh the moment, cometh the man. The Dealer Principal of the sponsoring dealer, Fennesy’s Holden, Ray Mountney, reached for the big number 1 wood and smacked that little ball off the deck all the way onto the green and into the hole to give them a Net score of 56.5, third place and the final qualifying spot to the Regional Final. You wouldn’t read about it anywhere else, but in a Holden Scramble, that’s just another highlight to add to the reel.

The hole-in-one bug had become infectious with two other aces recorded in NSW. The first was Trish Nielsen, who took a leaf from the Donnybrook event, holing her first shot of the day at the Cromer Golf Club Scramble. The following week, Craig Biddolph holed his tee shot on the 16th hole at everglades Golf Club to get his team within one shot of qualifying to the Regional Finals, but even a spectacular effort wasn’t enough to get them over the line, finishing 3rd.

More highlights are sure to come as teams make one final effort to try and qualify for the Regional Finals in October.

Good luck Scramblers!