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It’s on weekends like this that you really appreciate The Roar‘s comprehensive live blog coverage of every match that matters.
Sitting in a Hong Kong bar with 20 tour mates from Woodlands Golf Club, I find myself less interested in the goings on around me than in working my phone, tracking Newcastle’s unlikely comeback win over the Cowboys, the Phoenix pulling themselves up to never before seen heights on top of the A-League, and the Chiefs dealing to the Stormers at Newlands.
There’s a common theme to all those victories, which is teams at the top of their respective logs doing the business away from home. A banana skin for tipsters conditioned to ‘when in doubt pick the home team’, but so far this year there does seem to be less home field advantage at play across all codes.
Tee time at Hong Kong Golf Club also meant missing the Australian Cup at Flemington, and the opportunity to see Extra Zero run second for the 17th time in his career.
It may be unfair on ‘EZ’ and his connections but somehow it wouldn’t seem right to have his name on the cup alongside Makybe Diva, Lonhro, Northerly, Octagonal, Saintly, Better Loosen Up, Vo Rogue, Bonecrusher and… the list goes on.
Let’s hope Spillway goes on to enhance or at least retain the legacy of what was once a great race on the Australian calendar.
En route to a week at Mission Hills, Dongguan, otherwise known as ‘Disneyland for golfers’, our intrepid group has stopped off in Hong Kong to take advantage of our club’s reciprocal status with Hong Kong Golf Club.
A very useful arrangement that is too, considering that guest green fees are a stinging $400. Any reader considering relocating and perhaps joining this esteemed establishment can start raiding the kids’ piggy banks now – the joining fee kicks in at around US$1 million, with annual fees approximately US$25,000.
You have to seriously love golf to come at that – or else seriously love mingling with privileged, entitled, English twats, flouting their bloated expat salary packages and luxury cars as if they are actually contributing and participating in the real world.
In order to bring them down a peg or two a couple of our blokes casually brought up the Cricket World Cup, which proved to be a wasted effort – these golfers were simply unaware or disinterested and, while they sounded English, I suspect they were no longer English at all. Not in an Eoin Morgan sense, but an entirely different species; some kind of blended, expat blancmange, a grisly product of their own excesses.
Certainly none of these blokes will have made their fortunes on the back of a Jim’s Mowing franchise. Hong Kong is a vibrant, pulsing combination of many things – concrete and human – of which grass and backyards is not one.
A large electronic scoreboard behind the old course 18th green, in full view of the terrace where lunch and post-round drinks were being vigorously consumed, posted the progressive results for the member’s monthly medal, for all to track.
Member Matthew Ma, with a net 70, may well have been very pleased with his day’s work. But playing off a handicap of 47, thus hitting 117 off the stick, I’m extremely thankful I wasn’t in the group immediately behind him.
For the record, play moved along briskly on the old course, in part due to the zealous work of the course marshalls, looking menacingly like armed Indonesian guards on a prisoner transfer. Despite this uneasiness I managed to finish the round with the same ball I started with, no clubs were thrown in anger, although I can’t guarantee that cuss words weren’t used on a few occasions.
This tour has been carefully scheduled – six rounds of golf in seven days, arriving back in Melbourne on Saturday morning, just in time to dump the suitcase contents into the washing machine and resume position on the couch for New Zealand’s World Cup semi-final from Wellington.
The only hiccup in the schedule was the need to transfer to Mission Hills on Sunday afternoon, thus passing up the opportunity to attend the Hong Kong Derby at Sha Tin. Although any disappointment is tempered by the knowledge that not exposing myself to wall to wall passive smoking will add at least two years to my life.
Offsetting this is the benefit of not having to watch the latest instalment of the John Kirwan and Richard Graham horror show.
Super Rugby is one heck of a tough competition and there is nowhere for a coach to hide once things start to head south. This factor in itself buys coaches some time, particularly if their squads are hit by injury, but fans of both franchises are surely now entitled to be asking how much is enough?
For many, a Hong Kong experience often concludes with a ‘happy ending’, but in order to retain The Roar‘s PG rating, the time honoured ‘what goes on tour stays on tour’ creed will apply.
Suffice to say that many laughs have been had, and the good reputation of the Woodlands Golf Club remains intact as the tour caravan rolls on into mainland China.