Round Hill Roundup

A delightful day was had by all at Round Hill, not exactly a breaking news bulletin...

A couple of notes and a couple of pictures to share.  Very few of the players had been there previously, and

The beautiful Round Hill clubhouse above the ninth green.

many had never even heard of the place.  As I noted yesterday, it's a club with an amazingly low profile, and I'm guessing they like it that way.

It's a beautiful piece of property in the back woods of Greenwich,  and one sees only a handful of homes during the round.  Needless to say, these are not the types of homes that are hard to look at... and while it's a fairly compact place, most holes provide that wonderful feeling of being off by oneself.  There's more short Par-4's than is typical, but these are imaginative and include some of the more challenging green complexes, appropriate when one is hitting a short club in.

And the club is just first rate in all respects.  The guys were amused at my raving about the towels on the ball

Late on a very rough day, a man just wants to be alone with a soft towel.

washers, which just happened to be plusher and softer than anything in my home.  The clubhouse is a dramatic structure on the high ground of the property, and is of course beautifully appointed.  On the way out I happened upon a room where we had a short business meeting a few years back, with beautiful old world furniture and finishing touches.  Old Greenwich money for sure...  And the food served wasn't half bad, as I'll get back to later.

The devilish Par-3 sixth.

I played with my buddy Warren Light, paired with two delightful gentlemen from Whippoorwill, a fine Donald Ross course in its own right.  I should note that I had one of those days where I could drive the ball and putt, but every club with more than 9.5 degrees of loft was a complete mystery to me.  So we gave the gents much to laugh about, and laugh we did.  As a for instance, I was pin high in two on a Par-5, and never finished the hole.  

Similarly, on a long Par-4 I hit a snarky dying quail with a hybrid and ended up walking a hill looking for the ball with the caddie and two guys from another group.  The amazing thing about it was it was as much like walking the dunes since my last trip to Ireland, complete with folded over marram grass.  At the time I had wanted to do a complete post on the evils of marram grass, the marram de sod as I call it, truly evil stuff.  When the long grass folds over, it's like walking on a trampoline, so you can imagine the difficulty of playing from it.  If you hit towards you watch to see if the ball bounces... if so, you have a chance.  If it doesn't, it's buried and your only chance of finding it is to step in it.

Round Hill also has some of the best Par-3's around, but they are quite difficult.  On the sixth pictured

 above, the significant  left-to-right slope is minimized by the camera, as is the depth of the bunkers on the right.  When Warren hit into those bunkers I said my goodbyes to him just in case, you know, we didn't see each other again. It's a classic design concept, the hole makes you bail left, but good luck holding the green from there...

Warren, channeling his inner Bubba.

On the Par-5 second, our caddie told us that our line was the center of the cleavage.  As you can see from the photo at left, if that's her cleavage she can't be more than 14 years old...I don't know if Warren knows how far past parallel he takes the club, but he'll know now....

Our group finished on the third hole, a really special but really strong Par-3.  I had told the guys about the hole earlier, as it's a great hole where I had a notable train wreck several years ago.  Just a great hole, playing close to 220 yards, downhill but into the fan.  

 Our man Warren grabs his driver and hits a rope...it's all over the pin from the get-go, the only question

Wally's ball behind the pin on No. 3.

being whether it'll clear the bunker.  It does easily, pos up onto the green, and we have that pleasure unique to golf of watching it feed back to the pin.  Quite the poke for my buddy, and being the playuh that he is, the ten-footer coming back was center cut.  But you didn't need me to tell you that....

The day ended with the typical cocktail and hor d'oeuvres, though a particularly strong version thereof.  Lots of shellfish, beef tenderloin and the like.  I mention this because at one point a waitress came by with a platter of bacon-wrapped scallops, which were every bit as good as one would expect.  I'm a man who likes his treif, and if they go the trouble of combining variants of treif for you, one must be appreciative.  I told the waitress that if she happened to get her hands on another tray of said treif (I didn't use that word, of course), I would take the whole platter.  Sweet angel of mercy that she is, here's what she brought me: