During the winter months, the Golf Masters Tour Commissioner (TC) is a busy woman. By the time the season gets going, she has negotiated and paid for a range of great prizes, topped this year by a business-class, seven-night trip for two to the Monterey Peninsula with three rounds of golf at Pebble Beach and a brown envelope full of spending money.
With a runners-up prize of five-star accommodation in Portugal, golf at Penina and San Lorenzo plus a 50 per cent thinner brown envelope, you can see that she has done a good job. The site visits are particularly tough.
Summer rolls around and the TC gets itchy feet. Another gig beckons. This year it's the World Cup. A phone call is made to a Golf Masters underling. "Hello, underling, this is the TC here. We need someone to do the write-ups for the next few weeks. You know the sort of thing. You just ring up the weekly winners, plámás them about the brilliance of their team selections and emphasise the outstanding nature of the course where they will shortly be playing a fourball and eating lunch (Carton House).
"That should take care of the left hand side and there's always some quirky idea to fill the right hand side. A couple of hours and you should be done and free to return to putting up the spectator ropes for next week's Challenge Tour event from whence you came."
It all sounds so easy and you are so eager to satisfy the TC that you readily accept. Trouble is that like golf itself, it sounds so much easier than it actually is. You start a day behind due to the Monday finish at the TPC of Europe. You punch in the numbers and let the Golf Masters computers spew out the results. And the manager of the winning team is "No name given". You check the registration line. No phone number given either. The team name is "Paul's Pals" and the voice is female. No clues there.
Four other teams also included the week's two winners, Nick Price and Tiger Woods, but Paul's Pals are definitely tops.
So you look for something on the overall leaderboard and you see that John O'Mahony's "Ne Plus Ultru" have moved into second. Because you've read over all the previous weeks' write-ups you know that John's Inter Cert Latin told him this means "Perfection". You remember your own Inter Cert Latin and the phrase "Ne Plus Ultra" which roughly translated to "Perfection". Your old Latin teacher is easier to track down than Paul or any of his anonymous pals atop the weekly leaderboard and he gives "ultra" the nod over "ultru". You decide to change John's team name as another Latin phrase comes to mind. "O me miserum" which roughly translates to "woe is me". You still need a "quirky idea" for the right-hand side but the left hand side is finished. Gloria in Excelsis Deo! P.S. The manager of Paul's Pals can prove her bona fides by e-mailing team number and PIN to
