GOLF: `Coro' stars air weird tales

ANENDRA SINGH
It was Coro time again at the weekend.
No, not a special airing of the age-old British soap Coronation Street but the get-off-the-couch variety in the shape of the annual Coronation Cup for Hawke's Bay golfers. The four-zone competition has been around since the early 1950s and some of the rituals of the lower echelon players are hilarious enough to eclipse many of today's dour reality show programmes hogging prime-time slots on television.
Starring Tosh Dysart, 69, and Eddy Lowrie, 67, both of Crownthorpe Golf Club, Bill White, 65, of Mangateretere Golf Club, and Neil Thompson, of Waipawa Golf Club, the golfers last night were handpicked at the conclusion of zone 2 play at Golflands, in Hastings, to share some weirdly wonderful practices over the years.
For example, White, the father of former Bay representative golfer and long drive specialist Grant, revealed that the now defunct Flaxmere Golf Club, several years ago, under president Dave Peebles, had an unpalatable proposition for the worst performer in the competition.
"The worst individual had to scoff down a plate of cold, lumpy porridge in the club house in front of everybody," White explained, with a grinning Lowrie admitting he even had to have one once just for giving Peebles a hard time.
"I still stir things up when I go to the club (now Hawke's Bay Golf Club)," Lowrie said. Organiser Bob Chapman added that Lowrie was the "epitome of subtleties".
Lowrie said when Wairoa Golf Club hosted the event they often stayed at the Bella Vista Motel along Wairoa River.
"We'd get out of bed first thing before competition in the morning and try to hit a ball across the river to the other side. To this day I haven't seen anyone do it," said Lowrie, who with teammate Dysart have played for more than 40 years in the competition and won it twice.
White often left a couple of balls on top of the boiler cupboard overnight in the hope that the heated golf ball would go farther.
"I even put one in the oven one day and it developed a dimple and almost blew up," he said with a laugh.
Then there's the night at Te Pohue when Les Truman turned the fire hydrant hose on full blast at the main entrance to the clubhouse, preventing golfers from going home early from the 19th hole.
A lasting impression for Thompson was watching his Waipawa club's longest-serving member, Fraser Graham, cuddling the cup like a baby after they won the competition last year. At the end of play in zone 2 yesterday, hosts Mangateretere had faultless eight team points and 36.5 individual ones to toast victory and a place in the final on June 24-25.
Napier (six team, 24 individual points) and Crownthorpe (four, 21) were second and third, respectively. Waipukurau (2, 18.5) were next and a hapless Ongaonga failed to register any team points despite amassing 20 individual ones in the 12-man matchplay.
Mangateretere's Hector Keil and White were undefeated with four victories while Napier's Paul Gee, and Mangateretere's Te Kauru Greening, Jack Goldsmith, Brent Harris all had unblemished three victories and halved a game each.
Like any competition, Ongaonga golfer Murray "Muzzer" Hastie got the bragging rights at the clubhouse after his tee-shot on the curly No.7 par-5 hole drifted out of bounds over the fence line, struck a petrified pukeko and ricocheted back on to the fairway.
Mangateretere organiser Bob Chapman was delighted with the public course's new 116 stroke index rating.
"It was 101 a few weeks ago. That means players who lost strokes off their handicaps were this time playing in their normal handicap indexes," Chapman said.