BOMB: If Sunday is the day of rest, then Sunday after a week at the Hot List Summit is a day of pseudo-rest. On the plus side, it was the first day since we got here that I didn't have to set the alarm for 5 a.m. It also was a day I wouldn't have to write down anything other than a number on a scorecard. And after three days of taking notes from our player panels, writer's cramp was starting to set in.
No, today was the day for the annual Judges Cup--an unofficial event in which yours truly and Stina Sternberg take on Chief Justice Mike (Gouge) Stachura and John Strege for bragging rights. The venue was Coral Canyon GC in Utah, about a 40-minute drive from Mesquite. And with the wind blowing a steady 25 mph with gusts to 40, Gouge's high-launch, high spin shot had no chance. The good guys won, pocketing $10 American in the process. But the real winner was the drive up I-15 through some of the most spectacular mountains you'd ever want to see.
Not that the Hot List Summit ever offers a full day off. The ride up and back was spent calculating scores for some of our five criteria. And when we arrived back after golf, the four of us repaired to the local laundromat where somewhere between the clean and rinse cycle, we hashed out some more figures. After dinner we learned the Red Sox won and the Steelers lost (a split for Gouge's rooting interests). We also saw an older couple at the slot machines wearing his-and-her Tony Romo jerseys. The problem being that I also saw this couple when I came down for breakfast, when I returned from golf and when I went to the laundromat. We may have had a bit of a break today, but this pair clearly was still hard at work.
GOUGE: Here's what's really troubling: They hand out brochures for those with the early warning signs of gambling addiction right here in the casino next to the ATM machines and the one-armed bandits. The brochure is titled, "When the fun stops." Listen, if you need a brochure to tell you the fun has stopped, I'm thinking it's too late. And if you're grinding away at an Excel spreadsheet studying more than 30 sets of launch conditions late on a Sunday afternoon in a combination laundromat/car wash on the outskirts of a stateline casino town, not only has the fun stopped, you could argue that your fun-meter is clearly in the same neighborhood as the guy next to the Romo jersey twins who had one tether to his slot machine and the other tether to his oxygen tank. But the truth of the whole excursion to the red rocks of St. George and all the number-crunching (aside from the fact that I haven't broken 200 for my last two rounds) is that new technology cannot overcome golf in the elements. It’s why the scores in the Fry’s Electronics Open went from the mid- and low 60s to a scoring average of nearly 73 today when the winds got rough. It's why most par 5s into the wind from the friendly member tees at Coral Canyon were four-shot holes for us average hackers. The game always finds a way to win. But consider this: without today's drivers, you couldn't play a 6,500 yard course in 25 mile per hour winds. Somewhere it all equals out. But it really doesn't ever get easy. All those ready to sign up for a rollback ball on a 40-mile-per-hour gusty day, please step forward. I thought so.
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