President’s Trophy 2020

The inaugural Team Competition in conjunction with the President’s Cup was played on March 11^th. Nice weather and a tight tee time booking situation in Hong Kong ensured that we had 24 players competing in 4ball flights.

Organizing the event proved to be rather challenging, with about 10 special requests for early/late tee times and favorite playing partners as well as 2 Match Plays and a 4 ball team event where average handicaps were meant to be somewhat similar across the teams with 4 players having their HCs cut from prior events and to be distributed across the teams. And, as usual, late cancellations didn’t help either. On the brighter side, we were happy to welcome two guests and hopefully future members, John Coupland and Misch Mathes.

the first group set off at 8.36. Fired up by the highly competitive match between Noel and Terry, the team did rather well and despite having to digest the unfortunate loss of Niko after hole 12 because of a back injury, managed to clinch the team competition with a strong 87 points. 

The winning team with Niko missing

Noel managed not only to shoot a 79 off the stick but also beat Terry 4 & 3, a sweet revenge for a bashing he got last year. Not surprisingly, he also won the President’s Trophy with 40 points, despite having been cut by 2 shots from a prior win.

The happy winner flanked by granddad and junior

Two groups behind saw the match between JP and Craig. Craig applied every trick in the box and decided to go for a shank on hole 11, narrowly avoiding the ditch and placing the ball beside the pin for a par. Unfortunately, that didn’t help him win the match and he went down 6 & 4 but won the shot of the day as consolation prize.

Team 4, the bookmakers’ favorite with Roger as January’s winner in the team, somewhat faltered and eventually came in with 68 points to win the keenest team prize, aka nothing. Roger, not used to teeing off that late, managed to get 20 stableford points, about the same he shot on the front nine in January. This earned him the keenest golfer prize with upward potential for the coming events.

Nick in team 5 had obviously been to Deepwater Bay a few times over the past weeks, managing to shoot 16 on the par 3’s and winning the sharpshooter prize together with Jonny who will take him out for a nice dinner on the $100 they won jointly.

Our captain JP, back from 168 rounds of golf in Thailand, presented the prizes and a good day of golf came to an end in the member’s bar.