Seven events, six days, no trophy
The inaugural Masturds ran eight rounds across seven courses in six days and finished on a green with local money riding on it. Four men went. Nobody knew they were founding anything.
It was too much golf. Everybody had worked that out by the Sunday, at which point they had played thirty-six holes in a day and still had three more rounds in front of them.
Four men flew to Myrtle Beach on 26 April: Jack Church, Liam Wilkinson, Tom Cartwright and Gus Beswick. Church had built the schedule. Eight rounds, seven courses, six days, and seven separately named events — the Wee MB Classic, the Playas, Championship Sunday, the Jack's Kitchen Challenge, the GSK Technologies Match Play and, on the final morning at Caledonia, the Masturds itself.
The names were invented in advance and taken more seriously than the golf deserved. That turned out to be the point.
Championship Sunday
The week's centrepiece was thirty-six holes on 28 April — Tidewater in the morning, the Dye Club at Barefoot in the afternoon — and it belonged to Wilkinson from the first tee.
He went round Tidewater in net 69, the lowest round anybody played all week, added 74 at Barefoot and won the event by sixteen shots. Cartwright was second on 159. Beswick 163. Church, who had booked the whole thing, was last on 168.
The 122
True Blue on the Monday was the Jack's Kitchen Challenge — named for the kitchen where nights out used to finish, twenty years and several postcodes ago — and it was played as a stableford.
Wilkinson won that too, on 38 points, from Beswick on 36 and Church on 32. Cartwright returned 18.
The gross card behind that number is the worst round in the archive: 122, two clear of anything else recorded in two editions of this tournament. Cartwright plays without a driver by choice and carries a chipper, and at True Blue both decisions were examined at length by three other men.
Four matches, four halves
The GSK Technologies Match Play at King's North on 30 April — a play on the Dell Technologies Match Play, and on the fact that Cartwright works for GlaxoSmithKline — was singles, everybody against everybody, under storm cloud that never quite broke.
Every match was halved. All four men took half a point. Church and Wilkinson both shot 103, Beswick 109, Cartwright 112, and after a full day of match play the standings had not moved a single place.
Caledonia
The last morning was Caledonia Golf & Fish Club, and it produced the image the whole thing has been built on since.
The 18th at Caledonia comes in over water to a green sitting below the veranda of the plantation clubhouse, where the locals sit with a drink and watch. On this particular morning they were betting on whether each of the four would clear it.
Not everybody did.
They sat on that veranda afterwards with a beer, and the group photograph on the steps — green and water behind them — is the founding image of the Masturds.
The golf was the best of the week as well. Church went round in 90, the low gross round of the trip. Wilkinson won the event on net 70. Every man in the field except Beswick played his best round of the week on the last day, which is either a comment on the golf course or on the schedule that preceded it.
What the week showed
Wilkinson was the story and the numbers are not close. Six shots separated his best round from his worst across six rounds on six different golf courses — 97 at Caledonia to 103 at King's North. Church's spread was fourteen, Beswick's thirteen, Cartwright's fifteen.
He won Championship Sunday, the Jack's Kitchen Challenge and the Masturds, and tied the Wee MB Classic with Beswick on 143.
The overall standings, as recorded, read Church 85.5, Beswick 62.5, Cartwright 48.5, Wilkinson 36.5. He won three of the five scored events and finished fourth in the table. Both of those things are in the record and neither has been revisited.
The house
Two matters arising, neither of them scored.
There was an expensive steak dinner early in the week, the bill for which is still occasionally raised. And Beswick arrived at the house, located the master bedroom and its en suite, and took it without consulting anybody. Two years on that remains the only known instance of Gus Beswick moving decisively before anyone else had worked out what was happening.
There was also a night at Spyglass, a floodlit mini golf course on the strip, which went unscored and produced a photograph of two grown men in a set of stocks.
There was no trophy in 2024. There were no teams, no captains, no flights and no written rules. There was a schedule, four men, and a name somebody had made up as a joke on the Masters.
Seventeen months later there would be a gold cup with red, white and blue ribbons, eight players, two named sides and a rulebook. The four men on the veranda at Caledonia did not know any of that was coming. They just booked the next one.