Tuesday, August 7
The heat index is 116 today. The Masters played the 7:30 am round, when the heat was bearable. The afternoon round will be nasty.
Basically an even par is exceptional on all of these courses. My first round was with Rocky Russell and Scott Riley, who is leading the division at the moment. He hit all available deuces but one, and turned in a -6. Rocky shot -1, I shot 6 over, mostly due to two bad holes. Bad drives on tough holes can be a painful process. On one I lost a disc and waded through marshes, frantically trying to find the disc before three minutes were up. The result was soaked shoes and slime from the knees down.
After wrapping up our first round we had lunch at Damon's restaurant, a centrally located tournament sponsor. There were at least 50 golfers there. Blair Paulson of Alacrity Media, who makes the Worlds videos, put some hot footage on the screen there. Pretty cool.
The talk of the tournament is Scott Stokely, after he won mixed doubles with partner Elaine King and divisional doubles with replacement partner Kevin McCoy.
Yesterday for one of the divisional doubles rounds they used what was officially called a "Mark Ellis Modified Format." Whoa! Not true! It is not my format; I had nothing to do with it. I talked to Chuck Kennedy about it and he said "I knew you did something weird last year for one of the doubles rounds, so I made it up and named it after you." I'm sure there were hundreds of people cursing my name yesterday. I don't mind taking abuse for my own crazy ideas, but don't need additional abuse for someone else's crazy ideas.
I have had caddies for two rounds! Shocking. John Finnegan heard that I was playing with Harold Duvall and just showed up. Thanks John. Last night PDGA Financial director Pat Govang shows up, attended the flymart and displayed the cool PDGA 25th anniversary stuff, then stayed up late. We're rooming together, and this morning I'm up at 5am, and he rolls over and asks where I'm playing, grunts and goes back to sleep. Then at 7:15 he shows up and offers to caddy! Now we're in intense negotiations to see if he'll caddy for rest of week. He doesn't know yet how hot it will be in the afternoon. I think he will renegotiate.
Looks like Ron Russell has pulled out of the tournament with back problems, but I still haven't confirmed that for sure.
David Greenwell is playing in the Open division (he usually plays Masters), which tells you that he knows these are control courses, not power courses. He can throw less than 400 feet as good as anyone.
Haven't heard any first round Open scores yet, but Stokely is hot with two world titles in the last 24 hours. Schack is hot, Scott Martin is hot, you can never discount Climo, Cam Todd is on fire, the Winnicrew boys have been playing great (Avery Jenkins won the Mad City Open recently), and we know the Jenkins family in general is hot. Avery's sister Valerie just became the Juniors World Champ, adding another trophy to the mantel of the most famous frisbee family.
We're playing Oakwood this afternoon, it's long and tough. We're pulling into the parking lot now, so I'll talk to you later.
