My son Tim and I played in the Parent/Child Championship at our home club, Hop Meadow, in Connecticut this past Saturday. This was the last time we will compete in the 13 to 17 year old category as Tim, who is off to college next week, will be 18 next year (I turn 60 next year, so maybe they will let me hit from the forward tees.) We won our flight this year, but our goal was to win the overall competition. Our competition for the overall title was squarely in sight; we were matched in our six-some with the two toughest teams in the Parent/Adult Child category (the "adult child" was a mere 18 in each group).
The alternate shot format is the golfing equivalent of hanging wallpaper with your spouse. No matter how the job turns out or how hard you try not to show your emotions, something bad happens, and then your body language and facial expressions betray you. You may go in with a strategy - Tim was to tee off on the odd-numbered, tougher driving holes - but you still have to make the strokes. It is bad enough when you are playing your own ball and hit one OB or lose it in the trees; but when you do it in alternate shot, your partner inherits the mess.
Our Waterloo came at the 7th hole when Tim hit one into a tree next to a patch of high weeds. I figured we would find it so I struck my provisional tee shot with raging indifference, popping it up 140 yards down the fairway on the long par 4. We never found Tim's ball, and by the time we were done putting out mine, we had a triple bogey 7.
Long story short, we played quite well the rest of the way, finishing with a 77 which still would have been good enough to win if Brian, the dad in one of the other twosomes, had missed at least one putt all day (actually he did miss one, a 60-footer from the fringe, but he didn't miss any of the rest from 20 feet in). We lost by two strokes, and it would be easy to look at the 7th hole and say that was it, but in golf, you don't hit one shot badly and the other 76 perfectly. I missed two putts inside four feet and hit a few chip shots a little short, and Tim left me in the rough off the tee a few times. We hated to lose, but we lost to an excellent round of golf in a brutally tough format. After a few quick after-the-fact assessments of each other's play, we put it behind us. That is probably the best strategy of all for alternate shot golf.
The 420-yard par 4 7th hole at Hop Meadow Country Club in Simsbury, CT, our home course, cost us a lot of momentum on Saturday in the club's annual Parent/Child Championship. A lost tee ball in the trees and weeds on the right led to a triple bogey and, ultimately, a two-shot loss.