01905 731529
Posted on Jan 06, 2011 by Guy Marson
Enlightening evening on the course
Tom Guest – Sports Journalist Worcester News
WITH the sky heavy with drizzle and a dark winter’s night overhead, I questioned my sanity as I trudged down the cellar steps to awaken my trusty clubs from their annual October-to-February hibernation. The cobwebs were dusted off the bag and the water-proofs untangled from the lower reaches of the deepest pocket and I headed off to Ravenmeadow Golf Centre, on the Droitwich Road in Worcester, for my first taste of the ‘Nine at Night’ golf league.
The brainchild of Guy Marson, director of Modus Creative, and sponsored by MFG Solicitors, the nine-hole evening league is designed to raise money for Wooden Spoon Society, the charity of British and Irish rugby, which supports mentally and physically disadvantaged children.
Marson said: “I came up with the idea for Nine at Night after looking for a way to promote Modus, while raising money for the Wooden Spoon Society. “Everyone in the office thought it was a bit mad and exciting, so I called Leo Tarrant at Ravenmeadow, who jumped at the idea. “Everybody who has played so far has thoroughly enjoyed it and Wooden Spoon are even thinking of adopting the idea of a national level.”
With the Worcester Warriors team a man short, I was drafted in alongside marketing manager Tom Ryder and strength and conditioning coach Stuart Pickering and we made up one of 10 teams taking part on the night. After a few balls on the range, we stumbled into the darkness and headed for our shot-gun starting tee, which was the ninth, as our eyes grew accustomed to the dark. The fairways, tee boxes, greens and holes were all marked out with glow-sticks, while the special glow-in-the-dark balls were easy to track in the gloom. Finally, all golfers wore illuminated bands around their necks in a bid to avoid any on-course decapitations.
A firework was launched from the first tee at 7pm to signal the start of the night’s activities and, after a few tentative swishes, we found golfing in the dark wasn’t actually as hard as it sounded. The balls are easy to find, even in the thickest of rough, while the main difficulty we encountered was judging the distances to the greens and finding the optimum weight for the putts. T
he Nine at Night competition is played to a Texas Scramble format with 10 points going to the top team each week and decreasing to one for last place. The week two winners were the Chipping Bunkers team from chartered accountants Crowther Beard with 31.25 points, while Attraction World’s The Blackholers (32.05) claimed second spot.
