Annual Golf Match Report
The annual golf match OHGS v The School was held at Etchinghill Golf Club on Friday 15th April.
OHGS have never won this match at Etchinghill
whereas we have won all the matches held at Sene Valley except for 2003 when we halved.
On paper OHGS had a very strong team this year
which we needed to have to take on the boys, as there is a very high standard of golf at Harvey at present.
Our successes were John Edwards (15) and Geoff Cooke (12) playing on their home course and they won 2 up; Richard Young (7) and John Denham (13) had a good win of 5 & 4; Ian Gavin (6) and Graham Furneaux (12) Captain of OHGS, had a very tight match and halved with Graham playing against his son Hugo Furneaux. That was the end of our successes.
The lead match turned out to be crucial to the result as we always knew it was likely to be. Duncan Pike playing off 1 and Luke Jennings off 5 playing for The School are a formidable pairing especially at Etchinghill which is Luke's home course, so we needed our strongest possible opposition which we had in Henry Law playing off scratch (Henry is the Assistant Proffessional at Littlestone) and John Young off 5 (John is the current Vice Captain of Littlestone Golf Club). That proved to be a very tight game with OHGS almost coming back from being 3 down but losing on the last hole 1 down.
Derek Wood (14) and Bob Chappell (16) went down 3 & 2, and that just left John Oliver (14) and Dave Green (21) to take on Matthew Davy off (28) and Dean Law off (30). Mat's drive on the first hole virtually sealed the match before it started and having to give 11 and 12 shots to Mat and Dean respectively proved far too much an obstacle for OHGS and the match was over with Mat only dropping
7 shots to par off a 28 handicap!!!
The School won 3 1/2 to 2 1/2.
It was a great day played in the best spirit of golf and the highest standards of friendship and association with The School.
There was an impromptu Longest Drive and Nearest the Pin competition won by John Young (OHGS) and Charlie Homphrey (School) respectively. Earlier names on the board showed 'longest drive- Richard Young aged 68 1/2 years and ' nearest the pin' John Denham aged 71 years, which hopefully will be an encouragement to the boys that life does not finish at 30 or 40 but some of us are still active in spite of our advanced years!
