The Record
Two editions, two continents and one trophy, played for by seven men who in the ordinary course of things would have drifted apart a decade ago.
The Masturds began, as these things tend to, with two men who had no particular reason to know each other.
Jack Church and Tom Cartwright were introduced in their early twenties by girlfriends who were best friends. The relationships did not last. The friendship did — and two decades on, with Cartwright in the Cotswolds and Church seven thousand kilometres west in British Columbia, they still speak every day.
The rest of the founding four came out of Nottingham. Cartwright, Liam Wilkinson and Gus Beswick grew up in the same city across different school years. Church met Beswick through Cartwright in London.
He met Wilkinson somewhere else entirely — in a lobby of Call of Duty: Warzone during the pandemic, two strangers on headsets — and did not meet him in the flesh until Cartwright's wedding, where the pair found each other at the airport and drank their way to the church.
The premise was Church's, worked out with Cartwright, and it is almost aggressively simple.
One week of golf, once a year. North America, then Europe, then back again. Not a holiday — a fixture. Something written into the calendar early enough that the rest of life has to arrange itself around it.
It has since survived three weddings, three children, a house move, a business launch, a shoulder surgeon and an emigration.
Six men still book the flights.
April 2024. Four players, seven courses, six days.
No teams. No captains. No trophy. And a schedule its architect now concedes was too ambitious — two rounds a day, every day, on courses far enough apart that most of the week was spent in a car or on a tee.
What survives of it is not the golf. It is Beswick, arriving at the house and claiming the master bedroom and its en suite before anybody else had put a bag down, a manoeuvre that has never been formally addressed. It is a steak dinner nobody could really afford. It is Cartwright's 122 at True Blue, eighteen stableford points on the same afternoon, and still the worst round anybody has posted in this tournament.
And it is King's North, where four men played each other in singles match play and every single match finished all square. Four players, four halves, half a point apiece, and nothing whatsoever settled.
Then the last afternoon at Caledonia, where the eighteenth plays back over water to a green set beneath the plantation clubhouse veranda.
The locals up on that veranda had a wager running on each man as he stood over the shot. Not everybody cleared it. They sat up there afterwards regardless, with a beer, watching the next group come in — and that is the afternoon the whole thing has been chasing ever since.
Church shot 90 that day. It remains the best round anyone played all week.
Portugal is where it stopped being a golf holiday.
Eight players. Six sessions across six days. Two named teams, two captains, a written rulebook, flights, allowances — and, for the first time, something at the end of it worth taking home.
It was over by Wednesday lunchtime.
West Cliffs is the reason.
Second best course in Portugal, nineteenth in continental Europe, and on the Wednesday of that week it took the field apart. The average score was 108.9 — nine shots harder than any other round played all week. Every man in the field bar one posted his worst or near-worst score of the trip.
The Rockets took three and a half points from four on it and went five clear with three sessions left. Nothing that happened afterwards mattered.
They went back and played it again on the Saturday, and won that too.
Two individual lines came out of Lisbon that still shape 2026.
Church won the gross by forty-nine shots — a margin that stops being a competition and becomes a weather report.
And Beswick, playing off 29.4, won the net, returned more cup points than anybody on either side, and beat Church three and two on the Friday. He has still never lost a singles match in this tournament.
The trophy was bought by James Leigh, who is not travelling this year and who never held it. It carries no engraving.
For the last twelve months it has sat in Liam Wilkinson's house in Nottingham. Before anybody can take it off him it has to be collected from there and carried seven thousand kilometres to a mountain town in British Columbia — by the man defending it.
One champion in three attempts. Sixteen points on the table in September. The holders need eight; everybody else needs eight and a half.
All persons named below are, to the committee’s knowledge, alive and well, having simply changed jobs, run out of leave, or proved impossible to share a room with. They are dead to us only in the standings.
Captained the Sagres Swingers to a five-point defeat without personally winning a single match. Remove the scramble, in which all four of his players were credited the same two points, and his return for the week is nil: no four-ball, no low ball, and no singles on either day. He lost twice to Church and once to Allan. He finished joint-second in the gross and last in the net. He also bought the trophy, and has never held it.
Introduced by Church, who had played with him a few times in Vancouver. Finished last in the gross by thirteen shots and unbeaten in singles match play — a record neither captain managed. Was on the winning team. Has not been invited back, on the grounds that he proved unbearable to share a room with. No further explanation has been offered.