|
Choose Your Poison.
This is a summary of an interesting item from one of our national weeklies. The top ten Australian courses are listed in order with the current green fees if you were allowed on the course.
Joondalup is, I think, still one of our reciprocal rights clubs. Kooyonga does not rate a mention - I wonder why! The ten courses cited as being top outside Aus. are:
Accurate green fee info. is not available, but I believe that Shinnecock Hills is less than any of the Aussie courses above. If you are after golf information on
the Internet, try Editor That's Historical Ever thought about the origin of Stableford. Here is a potted history of the method. The WaIlasey Golf Club is a links on the Merseyside Coast of the Irish Sea, not far from Liverpool. It was there in 1931 that a local surgeon, his waxed moustache trembling in the wind, conceived a sys-tem of scoring a round of golf that in the future would be used round the world. Dr. Frank Barney Gorton Stableford was the surgeon, his system the Stableford. It is the only eccentric scoring system accepted in the Rules of Golf and has long been staple amateur fare in British golf, however, it rarely is played in the United States. The date when the inaugural Stableford competition was played at Wallasey was May 16, 1932. Stableford was born in 1871 in the English Midlands, trained at London's St. Thomas's Hospital and, aged 21, made his first contribution to golf. On a plot of land, a field meant for ponies, near Birmingham, he paced out the original course of the Robin Hood Golf Club. The club's current handbook tells of the young Stableford 'planting two sticks to mark a tee and one for a green: he did this for nine holes and then told the groundsmen to cut the grass.' In the summer of 1931 he presented his new scoring system to the Wallasey club. They tried it out on that Bank Holiday Monday in 1932. Stableford himself never won a Stableford competition. As he grew older, and he grew frail, he began to spend his time in the billiard room. At age 88, Stableford's eyesight began to fail. He was finally told he was going blind and two days later, on the morning of April 16th, 1959, he was found slumped in his study, dead of a gunshot wound. "It was a sad end for the old fellow," concludes the doctor, who had been called to the scene. "I don't think he could bear the idea of life without billiards or golf." Think of the Doctor next time you play Stableford. He who enabled indifferent golfers like some of us to enjoy almost any round in all weathers without worrying about the 27 on the dreaded fourth. Frank Coulter.
|
