We're not quite sure how to break this news to the people who run Mount Juliet, but here goes: in the not so distant future The Naked Wagons (formerly known as Standard Deviation) might be arriving at your beautifully appointed golf course to play the fourball won this week by their drummer, Rory Dungan.
We hope that, if Rory decides to bring them along, they will be on their best behaviour (there'll be no chucking of television sets out the clubhouse window, we have been promised). But given that they are a rock band made up of rowdy teenagers we can give no guarantees . . . so it might be an idea to bump up the insurance before they arrive in their psychedelic 1973 Hiace van (relax, only joking). Rory was the author of Fred Funk's Holiday, the "unique" story we serialised in weeks 10 and 11. At the time he confessed that his teams were doing so badly in the competition that he'd given up on even checking their scores, so he was a bit stunned when we rang with the good news. If Stuart Appleby hadn't won the Kemper Open at the weekend, Mount Juliet might have been spared - sorry, might have missed out - on a visit by The Naked Wagons (Rory explained how they got their name but we'd prefer not to go in to it here). In fact he is one of only 363 managers to employ the 27-yearold Australian.
Don't Go in That Bunker also features Tommy Tolles and Brad Fabel, who took a share of third in America, in its line-up, as well as Robert Allenby who finished seventh at the English Open. Costantino Rocca's £500 for missing the cut at Hanbury Manor brought the team total to £257,500 and catapulted them in to 16,814th place, which is just about as well as some of Rory's other teams are doing (including Oh My God, Look at Our Phone Bill, The Thyroid Glands, The Narcissistic Flowerpots and The Heavy Phonebooks, who did at least finish sixth in week 14. Luckily another of Rory's teams, They Wear Wigs, has never troubled the overall leaderboard - even if they won the competition we could never reveal their line-up, for fear of litigation).
Kevin Barry and the Murnaghan brothers, Tony and Brian, could have done with some of The Heavy Phonebooks' good fortune at the weekend, after their Augusta Special and Bargain Basement line-ups suffered their worst week of the competition so far. Jose-Maria Olazabal, Bob Estes and John Huston didn't play at the weekend, and Darren Clarke and Thomas Bjorn won under £8,000 between them: all five players appear in both teams. The Murnaghans' decision to replace Peter Lonard with David Howell last week paid off, however: Lonard took the weekend off while Howell won £5,250.
Fortunately for the top two, the teams' just behind them last week, many of which also include Clarke, Olazabal, Estes, Huston and Bjorn in their line-ups, had similarly miserable weekends. Charles Daly of Dungarvan, Co Waterford, was one of the few to take advantage of the slump above him. While last week he jumped from 78th to 13th, this week he's up again to fourth. Other managers who made good progress in week 14 were Gerry Lonergan (16th to seventh), Dermot Ryan (23rd to eighth) and Robin McNaughton (29th to ninth).
The average score in week 14 was a modest £50,129, while the average overall score to date is £983,153. Lee Westwood's second successive Tour victory moves him to the top of our leading earners' list for the first time, just ahead of Colin Montgomerie (1,552 of our 18,076 managers have Westwood in their lineups), while £2.1 million-buy Patrik Sjoland rises to fifth, just behind Jim Furyk and Fred Couples.
This week's action takes place at the European Grand Prix at Slaley Hall, Northumberland, and the Buick Classic at Westchester CC. Richard Coughlan, Keith Nolan, Nick Faldo, Darren Clarke, Lee Westwood, Bernhard Langer, Jose-Maria Olazabal and Ian Woosnam are amongst the entry for the Buick Classic.
