By Sean Warley / DiscLife.com
Wednesday, August 2

Tom Woods retrieves his disc after a 500 foot ace. Photo: Sean Warley

It didn’t get any easier for the Advanced players at the Toboggan course on Wednesday. The early morning round started with good weather and Advanced Men had to take advantage early. Tom Woods nailed an ace on Hole Three with a huge helix shot. It curved perfectly around the trees and clipped a couple of branches just before crashing into the bottom of the basket 500 feet away! After retrieving the shot, he revealed his secret: On the tee, he mentioned to his girlfriend that it would be nice to get his first tourney ace so she kissed the disc just before he threw! CHING!

Then, the rain began and didn’t quit for two hours. Reports of 45 minute rain delays were reported from Cass-Benton, but Toboggan avoided them. Good thing since it took all of 4 hours 10 minutes to complete the round. Now, we are slightly behind schedule again! Only four players of the 72 in the field managed to post a 59, including Jon “One Disc” Tylzynski, who played the entire course with just one Cyclone. I’ll bet he would have liked to get a kiss!

Advanced Masters were next to tackle the course. It was the only round of the day for the old guys but it proved to be the most difficult. Shortly after play started, it began raining again. Another two solid hours of rain forced this round to take more than 4 hours and 45 minutes of grueling golf. Ouch! Not a single player broke into the 50’s. The leader, Hersh Jones, still managed to tie 3 other players with the best round of 63. I witnessed one player lose some blood on hole 10 after driving past the basket and lots of rolling putters after hitting just inches too low. The rain created a mud slide between hole 7 and 8 and a bog between 5 and 6. Thankfully, the temporary course features rubber tee pads made from recycled tires that offered excellent traction. I did hear some reports that the Advanced Masters felt the Chainstar baskets were to small and that the tee pads were to far from the pin. We assured them that it was only the fog on their bifocals! ;-)

Tonight the cards will be re-shuffled and all the Advanced divisions will move to the Hudson Mills area for the final three rounds of preliminaries. We'll bring you coverage of all the leader cards in each division. Say a prayer for us tonight and ask for no more rain, we are soaked to the bone!