Humour
The club prize-giving night, in the order it always runs
Andrea Lee won a car with an ace in South Korea. Club golfers get a raffle, a roast dinner and a trophy too heavy to hold: The 19th Hole's running order for the end-of-season presentation evening.
Andrea Lee’s previous hole-in-one, at a pro-am in Shanghai, won her a toy Buick, according to Golf Channel. “I was like, I don’t want this. I want the real thing,” she said. On Friday 23 October she holed a 9-iron from 122 yards at the 8th at Pine Beach Golf Links, in the second round of the BMW Ladies Championship, and drove away with a MINI Countryman.
Club golfers are at the toy-Buick end of the prize table. The competitions are finished for the year, the presentation evening is in the diary, and every club’s version runs in roughly this order.
7pm: The trophies come out of the cabinet
They spend 51 weeks behind glass and one evening on a trestle table under a green cloth. Somebody has polished them. Nobody knows who. The biggest is a silver jug presented by a member in the 1920s, whose name has mostly worn off the plinth. It holds about four pints, which is the only way its winners have ever measured it.
7.15pm: Raffle tickets go round
A pound a strip, sold from a biscuit tin. The prizes are on a side table: a bottle of whisky, a dozen balls, a voucher for the pro shop and a bottle of red that was won in last year’s raffle by someone who had won it in the raffle the year before.
7.45pm: Dinner
Roast, then sticky toffee pudding. The winter league team sits together and discusses the temporary green on the 4th.
8.30pm: The captain’s speech
Ten minutes are allowed on the printed programme. The captain thanks the greenkeepers, the bar staff, the committee and the past captains present, then the greenkeepers again, after a note is passed up from table three. The review of the season covers the wet spring, the new drainage on the 11th and the visit of the county seniors, and includes one joke about the captain’s own golf, which gets the biggest laugh of the night because everyone has played with the captain.
8.55pm: The small prizes
The nearest the pin at the 7th in the August medal went to a ball nine feet away, on a day when the next nearest was 41 feet. Seventeen members had a two in the twos sweep, the pot was £85, and each of them is handed a £5 note.
The Stableford winner with 44 points gets a polite round of applause and a voucher. Everyone in the room knows what 44 points does to a handicap index, and so does the winner. We have explained how that works.
9.20pm: The hole-in-one roll
Under Rule 3c of the R&A’s Rules of Amateur Status, the £700 prize limit does not apply to a hole-in-one prize, as long as the shot is made during a competition and is at least 50 yards long. An amateur could, within the rules, drive home a MINI Countryman.
At most clubs the prize for an ace is a certificate, a name on the board by the bar and a round for everyone in the clubhouse, paid for by the golfer.
9.35pm: The club championship
The champion is asked to hold the trophy up for the photograph while the photographer adjusts the settings. The trophy weighs roughly as much as a small child. Rule 3c also excludes trophies from the prize limit, so the champion’s amateur status survives the evening even if their shoulders don’t.
The name goes on the plinth in January. The plinth has space for two more names. After that, another band of wood goes on underneath, so the oldest trophies at any club are also the tallest.
9.50pm: The raffle draw
It takes longer than the prizes. Every number is read out twice, with the colour. “Pink, 47” brings a member from the back with pink 74, who walks all the way back again. The first ticket drawn belongs to the person drawing it, who puts it back in the tin to applause.
The bottle of red goes to someone new.
10.30pm: The bar
Last orders are at 11pm. The winter league starts at 9am on Sunday, with temporary greens on the 4th and the 11th.
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