ALL FORE ONE
Sunday was to be graduation day, though
Gamer had warned we might not all be on
the podium. We were guaranteed, though,
a couple of holes on the Mountain Course,
the big boy on the Windham House property, which spans 300 acres. After lunch
we head up the hill, and after a false start,
find No. 16 open. We would play a scramble, in which everyone tees off and then
hits the next shot from the location of the
group’s previous best shot, and so on until
we putt out. No. 16 is fairly straight and
slopes left and down to the hole. Gamer
has the best shot, to be expected, slightly
right and about 180 out. We all hit from
there and go on to make par as a group:
down in 4.
At 17, we find a medium par 3, which
nobody nails, but Gamer is again closest.
And again, we manage to get down for
par. Then comes No. 18, a stunning beauty
affording a view across a lush valley and to
Windham Mountain, like a hole on those
fantasy golf calendars. The ideal shot off
the tee is a long iron to the corner, where
the fairway makes a sharp right turn, and
where it is tiered like mountainside farms
in the Andes. You want to hit the bottom tier but no farther or you’re down in
the woods. Gamer nails it, though we all
hit good shots. That leaves us 155 yards
downhill to the green and into a slight
breeze. Above and high up to the right
of the green is a pond that, of course, one
of us hits. Another lands on the side hill
below the pond and rolls down near the
fairway. Gamer puts up a towering shot
right at the flag. I go last and hit a clean,
straight shot but, into the sun, we can’t tell
if it made the green or not.
Once we get down there, we find Gamer’s ball on the front fringe and, lo and
behold, my ball on the green, eight feet
from the hole and slightly downhill. We
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