A Golf Story

In August 2000, I attended Russ Hamilton’s gold tournament in Lake Tahoe.  The entry fee was about poker $2,000, but that covered airfare from Vegas, a room at Harrah’s, three greens fees (including one on the famous Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course), prizes, and bus rides to the venues for three days of golf action.  Over 50 poker players ended up attending this poker tournament in 2000.  the gold magazine Maxim sent a writer to cover the high-stakes golf action.

  Discovery Channel even sent a camera crew to follow some of us around.  Wedeen Eoils brought  a movie producer to the event, to give him some inspiration about high low poker -stakes golf matches for a gold movie he was working on.  By the way, Wendeen also went ahead and won the Russ Hamilton golf tournament’s final no-limit Hold’em tournament, for which the first prize was a “Card Player Cruise.”

            My group on the first day at Sierra Nevada Golf Course consisted of Layne Flack, Ralph Rudd, Jack Ryan, and me.  Sierra Nevada is a beautiful gold course with a lot of desert and trouble, but non of the dreaded trees that hurt my slice shots so much.  After I shot a 99 and Layne shot about 95, he and I decided to play Ralph (105) and Jack (93) a two-man scramble for about $1,000 a team ($500 a man) a hole.  In a two-man scramble, both play poker card games on each team hit a drive, then the team (both players) selects the better drive, and then both players hit their second shot from that spot.  The same thing goes for the third, fourth, and fifth shots.  Because of these shot selections, a two-man team usually makes a lot of pars and some birdies, but we are all bad golfers, so we made three bogies and one par for the first two holes of competition.

            Layne and I thought poker we had the advantage, because we knew we were longer off the tee than Ralph Rudd and Jack Ryan were.  In a scramble, it sure helps to hit your approach shots from 120 yards out rather than 150 yards.  When we announced to everyone else for the our emergency-nine match ( a desperate attempt to get even for the day on a nine-hole match defines “emergency nine” about perfectly), then the real action began.

            While I ran to buy more golf balls, Huck Seed decided to bet $1,000 a team on our side of the bet.  Then Jeff Friedman bought Huck’s bet from him for $1,000 (obviously, Jeff though our team would win by more than one hole), and the game of cards was on.  Before long, we were playing for over $6,000 a hole, with carry overs, so that if we tied all eight first holes, then the ninth would have been worth $54,000.  Now, the problem with a two-man scramble is this: who hits first and who hits second?  I mean, when your partner shanks a ball into the desert out of play, can you step up under tremendous pressure and hit a safe shot onto the fairway or the green?  Remember now, this isn’t poker we’re talking about here. 

We are all poker champs, but this is golf spooky hand.  This is the main reason that poker players love playing high-stakes golf.  Can you hit the shot when you are under all that pressure?  Can you make the six-foot straight-in putt to win $12,000, or miss it and lose $12,000?  What are you really made of?  Are you a champion like Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods, or a choker like a lot of other PGA golfers on the final day of a PGA tournament?

As we stood on the during this match, Ralph asked us to cancel the match-which to this point was even-or double our bet with him.  Layne and I decided to double our already escalated bet to $3,000 a team (it seemed as if the bets were also  kicked up now with everyone else, to about $10,000 a hole total), and now it was our turn to hit our tee shots.  The distance to the hole on this par three was about 115 yards or so.  Layne hit a shot that I thought was out of play wsop 2002.  It was amazing then how heavy the club felt in my hands.  My team needed me, Huck Seed (who was following the match) needed me, and Jeff Friedman needed me.  If I messed up, then we would certainly lose this hole.  As I stepped up to the ball, I just tried to focus myself on the task at the flag.  The club still felt heavy to me, but I managed at least to hit it about 102 yards and knock it on the green.  I thought, “Yes!”

            When Layne and I walked down to our ball, we knew what putt we would have, because I had had the exact same putt earlier in the day.  Now we had two chances to knock the 36-foot putt in, or at least leave it close so that we could make a par.  We knew that Jack and Ralph would make a par (or better) from about 25 feet away, straight up the hill.  But this was no ordinary 36-foot putt that Layne and I faced; in fact, it had about 10 feet of break in it.  So that lagging this putt up there close to the hole involved a very high right-to-left trajectory.  This was the kind of putt in which finding the right speed was of the utmost importance, if you wanted to leave it close to the hole. 

Layne hit a nice putt to about 8 feet past the hole, and now I knew, watching Layne’s shot, exactly what the putt would do.  I had seen this putt three times already today!  Unfortunately, I made the same mistake I had made that morning, and the same mistake that Layne had just made.  I hit it 7 feet past the hole.  This was a very bad result for the man who is supposed to be hitting the money shot.  In other words, I blew it.  Now Ralph and Jack knocked their putt to within a foot, and we had to concede their par to them.  We needed to make our 7-footer just to halve the hole (tie).

            Now that we were on the other side of this hole, our putt broke on a left-to-right trajectory about 10 inches, from just 7 feet or so.  Layne made another nice roll from 7 feet, but he just missed the putt on the high side.  “Just make a good stroke,”  I told myself.  There really wasn’t too much pressure on me now, because no one expected me to make that putt anyway.  No one, that is, except me wsop event.  After stalking the putt for just over a minute, I pulled my putter back and stroked it as well as I could.  The putt rolled right on trajectory toward the hole, and I yelled, “Gentlemen” (Yosh Nakano’s favorite golfing line), as I walked away smiling.  Wait a minute, though.  The putt broke extra-hard right at the end, still hit the hole fairly solidly, but didn’t drop.  Oh well, no one ever said that golf is my game!