THE SWING REPORT

First time the league has played the back nine. Did that help?

It was beautiful. Genuinely — you come round and it looks like a completely different course, different light, different everything, and I remember thinking, this is where it starts. Some players see a new nine and get nervous. I saw a scoreboard with my name on it.

Three on the 17th, par 4. That's a birdie, and I'd like it noted that I didn't celebrate, because you don't celebrate in the middle of a run. Six rounds in the book at 36.8 going in, and now a 34. I'm not going to say the championship is over. I'm going to say that people who look at that trend and don't feel something are not paying attention.

Carr also posted a net 34.

Carr had a lovely day and I'm thrilled for him. Genuinely thrilled. It's a shared win, it's on the sheet, I'm not disputing the sheet.

I'll also say Fanelli and Wilkins bailed last minute, and I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I'm simply saying that word travels in this league, and some weeks the smart move is to be somewhere else.

Let's talk about the hole of shame.

No. Let's not call it that. Whoever named that segment has never stood on a par 5 with the wind doing what it was doing, and I'd like it on the record that the phrase presumes a verdict before the evidence. Shame is a strong word. Shame is for a moral failing. This was a golf hole.

Also, and I want to be fair to the grounds crew here, they'd just punched the greens. Everybody's putting had variable outcomes. Everybody's. You could hit the same putt twice and get two different answers, and I saw better men than me leave a ball three feet short and stand there like they'd been personally insulted. So when we discuss what happened on the 12th, we discuss it in that context or we don't discuss it.

Fine. I took 10. It was a par 5. It took what it took, and I could walk you through every stroke, and I will, briefly: there was a decision made early that in hindsight was ambitious, and then there was a second decision made in defence of the first one, which is where these things actually go wrong.

And for what it's worth — nobody asks this part — I came in at net 43 against a season average of 47. Four better. There's a man in this league who had a worse week than me relative to himself and nobody's made him a segment.

Three birdies and even gross, and you finished tied for third.

Right. And I want to be careful how I say this, because I've been saying it politely for a while now and politely isn't working.

Ten, par 4, three. Sixteen, par 5, four. Seventeen, par 4, three. I shot even. That is the round I have been telling people is in there since roughly the start of the season, and I finally went and did it in front of witnesses, on a nine none of us had played, with the greens freshly punched so nobody could accuse me of a soft afternoon. Low gross, 36. That's the number.

The handicap system and I have an understanding, which is that it keeps playing against me and I keep showing up anyway. I take zero strokes. Zero. So a good day for me arrives at the scoreboard already spent, and a good day for somebody else arrives with luggage. I'm not naming names. I'm delighted for Hecht, who I notice has plans.

Two better than my own average, which is 38, and I've been waiting a long time for the numbers to say out loud what my swing has been saying for weeks. I'll take low gross. It's a different prize. It's still a prize.

The 15th. Tell it properly.

I was in the bushes. Back against a tree — actually against it, not near it, I could feel the bark through my shirt. Fifty yards out. There was no swing available to me that a coach would sign off on, so I made one up.

It went in. Par 3, I took 2. That's the whole story and I've told it four times today and I'll tell it again tonight, and each time the tree gets slightly larger, which I think is fair compensation for the position it put me in.

Did the rest of the round match it? It did not. I'm 1.8 worse than my average and I'd rather have the 50 yards. Lemoine had one of those afternoons too — 2.8 the wrong way from a season average of 37.2 — and he took it well, which is more than I'd have managed. Meanwhile Wesselink comes in 7.7 better than his own average and gets no segment at all, which tells you everything about how this newspaper is run.