Martha’s Place Tournament

The best thing about playing charity golf tournaments is that it makes you feel less guilty about spending four or five hours outside doing something that is ostensibly a rather nonsensical and self-indulgent activity. On Friday, I happened into another charity tournament through my hubby’s work, which was a sponsor for the annual golf outing to benefit Martha’s Place, a residential recovery program for women in Baltimore who are overcoming drug addiction and homelessness. 

The tournament had an 8am shotgun start so we were up at 6am. Luckily the venue was the nearby Pine Ridge GC, or we’d have to wake up even earlier. The format was a bramble, a variant of the scramble in which everyone in the foursome tees off, goes to the best-positioned ball for their second shot, and then plays their own ball from there. Everyone can keep an individual score, but the team score is the lowest individual score on each hole. Mulligans were on sale for $10 each or 3 for $20. We bought 6.

Hubby and I played as a twosome, since a third person who had been paired with us did not show up. At 7:45am, everyone loaded into the golf carts lined up outside the clubhouse, and we listened to the introductory remarks. I scanned the crowd and saw only one or two other women playing the tournament that day, so I figured I had a one-in-three chance to win the women’s long drive, since that was the only individual female category to win.

Not that I counted on it, because I’d been dead-pulling my drive lately. Hubby said I wasn’t extending my arms straight toward the target on the release, but I knew that wasn’t it. Perhaps it was the early morning clarity, but after the second hole, I suddenly realized what it was. In the past few weeks I’d been making an attempt to drive with my arms hanging straight down instead of reaching forward a little bit. I thought keeping my arms closer in to my body would help generate more clubhead speed. But doing this forced me to hinge my wrists more at address, so I was rotating my wrists through impact as if I were holding a jump rope, flicking them left. This caused my tee shots to go straight to the left. But once I realized it, I was able to fix it and my drives straightened out nicely.

In fact, hubby and I ended up using my tee shot as the preferred lie for 11 out of 18 holes that day. The result was a team score of 78, which wasn’t low enough to win the team title. However, I did win the women’s long drive for my tee shot on Hole 6 (the designated hole for the challenge), which rolled a respectable 207 yards on a downhill fairway. And I shot 90 as an individual, which is a new low for me, even though it was mainly due to the bramble format. As a prize, I won two ladies golf shirts, a fleece jacket, and $50 in gift cards.   

At the end of the day, I went home with lots of swag, and just a little less guilt.

Hole 6 at Pine Ridge is a downhill dog-leg right with lots of rightward slope. The trick is to aim left and let your ball go for a ride.