16th Eurobuild CEE Golf Tournament – It’s raining balls

It rained. In fact early in the morning on 23rd June, it was bucketing down. But golfers are a stoic breed and so despite the inclement weather they came anyway to the 16th Eurobuild CEE Golf Tournament at the Warsaw Golf and Country Club, which was sponsored by (among others) MBank Hipoteczny, and Hillwood.

The players arrived with brollies at the ready for breakfast wearing the loud shorts and shirts and befitting of a golf course, though probably not the apparel you might expect to see on a fashionable Paris catwalk. Crimes against good taste aside, the breakfast lasted an extra 40 minutes, after which the monsoons abated and an opportunity arose for the brave to start thwacking balls into the middle distance. The ground may have been sodden, but the state of the driveways and the greens remained immaculate. Even though the skies remained grey, the drizzle did not constitute enough of an excuse to call off play and the local swans remained unruffled and strangely unconcerned by the oncoming barrage of miniature spherical projectiles. There may have been no Tiger Woods or Seve Ballesteros present that day, but what the players lacked in professionalism they made up for in enthusiasm with some gleefully digging themselves into bunkers faster than the soldiers of the first world war. Teams of three to four players were each assigned a starting hole and gradually trudged their way around the course, while others foreswore the stroll to race around in golf buggies. When the players eventually circled round to the ninth hole, they were presented with the furthest drive competition won by Zbigniew Bujalski while the closest to the pin competition held at the 14th hole was won by Ela Panas. Later on in the day, just before lunch, the Golf Academy was held for those who don’t know the difference between an iron and a putter. A few balls flew and many hundreds rolled down the driving range as the finer points of the golf swing were patiently explained to the beginners. Having figured out that the fat end of a club is supposed to hit the ball, we were taken off the range and presented with the challenges of the green. Just occasionally a ball or two would sink down a hole. Two competitions were held for the newbies among us, which were the longest drive won by Joanna Stankiewicz and the closest to the pin, which was won by ... erm ... me. (I swear it wasn’t a fix; I just seem to have let my hitherto unknown competitive spirit get the better of me. Honest!) Other competitions, included Stableford net (whatever that is) won by Tomasz Pachecki, stroke-play net won by Dariusz Kościkiewicz and stroke-play/medal won by Marek Tymiński. The heavens then opened up once more to summon all the players in for lunch.