The Field
One of them has halved his handicap in two years. One of them has never lost a match. One of them has never won one, and captains a side in September.
Every returning player who has actually played has cut his index. The field average has come down from 21.5 to 19.1, and only one man has gone the other way.
With James Leigh out, the gap from Church to the next travelling player is 7.9 shots. In Lisbon he shared the top of the field with Leigh at 11.8. He now stands alone at the top of it by a distance that would be uncomfortable in any field of this size.
| Jack | Liam | Tom | Gus | Alexei | Guy | James | Harris | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jack | · | — | — | 0–1 | — | — | 2–0 | — |
| Liam | — | · | — | — | 1–1 | 1–0 | — | — |
| Tom | — | — | · | 0–1 | — | 2–0 | — | — |
| Gus | 1–0 | — | 1–0 | · | — | — | — | 0–0–1 |
| Alexei | — | 1–1 | — | — | · | — | — | 0–1 |
| Guy | — | 0–1 | 0–2 | — | — | · | — | — |
| James | 0–2 | — | — | — | — | — | · | 0–1 |
| Harris | — | — | — | 0–0–1 | 1–0 | — | 1–0 | · |
Read across. A dash means the two have never met with a recorded result.
Beswick's row contains no defeats. Mitchell's contains no wins.
Cartwright's 2–0 over Mitchell is the only clean sweep anywhere in the archive, and the two captains have met once — Wilkinson, three and one, on the final afternoon in Lisbon.
There is no precedent in this archive for what Church has done to his own golf. He arrived in Myrtle Beach off 13.4. He goes into September off 6.7, having won the Lisbon gross by forty-nine shots with the tightest scoring spread of anyone in the field.
He lives two minutes from the Redstone first tee, plays five times a week when there is no snow on it, and is vice-president of the men's club. Four of the six cup sessions are on his own course.
None of which may matter. Every format this week is played at handicap, and Church now gives strokes to all seven of them. In Lisbon he won the gross by a distance and finished bottom of his own winning team on cup points — the clearest illustration available that being the best player and being the most useful one are different jobs.
The short game is the strength and the ball striking is not. The shot people still bring up is a lag putt at West Cliffs, across a multi-tiered green and over several hills, to a foot.
The most dangerous man in the field is the one with no record at all.
Forton is president of the men's club at Redstone, where Church is his vice. They are neighbours. They play most days. He is 7.9 off a low index of five, he hits a two-hundred-yard shot close every single time, and by Church's own admission he wins more of their matches than he loses.
None of that appears anywhere in this archive, because he has never played a Masturds round. Every other price on the odds page rests on five rounds of hard evidence. Forton's rests on a number and an assumption.
He arrives as second favourite for the Low Gross and the largest question mark on the board.
Wilkinson is the only man to have won this tournament, and he did it as a captain.
He is also its most consistent scorer by a margin nobody else approaches. Six rounds across six different courses in Myrtle Beach produced a spread of six shots, best to worst. Nobody else in the archive is inside twelve.
He plays backwards from the green — a short one to set up the next, to set up the next — which is why the singles stableford at Balfour is his session, and why he has never posted a card that came apart in the middle.
Four shots have come off his index in a year, achieved with a large anterior labral tear that came within a consultation of surgery. He was cleared in June and booked his flights the same day.
He defends in September with a trophy that has sat in his house for twelve months and a rule that says a tie is enough to keep it.
Stretton posted the best single net round of Lisbon — a 71 at Praia d'El Rey on the opening morning — and then lost Flight A by one shot across the remaining four days.
He is the only man in the field who has visibly done anything about his weakness. At West Cliffs he was out on the practice green every evening while the rest of them watched him through the bar window.
He also arrives in worse shape than anybody. Rotator cuff tendonitis, a child born in May, a house move and a business relaunch inside the same quarter, and barely a club swung since June. He plays one round a day, and under the rests rule that is a captain's decision rather than a medical note.
If the shoulder holds he is a top-three problem. If it does not, whoever spends a pick on him loses a body in a session of their choosing.
Mitchell captains the challengers, and the record he brings to the job is the hardest fact on this website.
Three singles matches in Lisbon, three defeats — twice to Cartwright, once to the man he now opposes. He lost the four-ball on the Monday and the low ball on the Tuesday. Every point he has scored in this tournament came out of the Thursday scramble, in which all four of his team were credited the same two.
He is the only player in the field whose handicap has moved the wrong way, and the only one the model makes an underdog in every single match-up on the board.
Against all of that: a simulator winter, a club fitting in March, a couple of lessons and almost no scoring evidence in either direction. He is the least readable man here. He has been asking since January for a course tough enough to hurt him, and in the Rockies he gets Wildstone.
Beswick is the worst golfer in this field and the hardest man in it to beat, and both of those things have been true for two years.
He has never lost a singles match. Two wins and a half from three — and one of those wins was beating Church three and two at Royal Óbidos, off 29.4 against 11.5. He beat Cartwright four and three the following afternoon.
He won the Lisbon net on 374 and returned four and a half cup points, more than anybody on either team. He finished seventh of eight on index and first of eight on net: six places better than his number, a margin nobody else in the archive comes close to.
His raw scoring remains the worst here — 534 gross, seventh of eight — and he posted forty-four stableford points in August off an index that is still falling. The handicap system exists for precisely this, and he has now beaten it twice.
He also took the master bedroom in Myrtle Beach. That remains unaddressed.
Cartwright is the reason the trip functions and the reason nobody can price him.
He books the cabins, collects the money, names the teams and makes the logos every year, unprompted. He has also played three rounds in twelve months, which means he arrives with a twelve-month-old handicap and no idea whether it flatters him or robs him. In net formats that cuts both ways, and nobody finds out until Thursday morning at Castlegar.
He does not hit a driver. He carries a chipper. He answers to T-Rex arms.
He owns the worst round in the archive — 122 at True Blue, eighteen stableford points the same afternoon. He also finished joint-top of the winning team on cup points in Lisbon, and has beaten Mitchell in both singles matches the two of them have ever played.
All of that is true at once and none of it predicts the next one.