Pay Your Money, Take Your Chances

Chad Feldheimer turned me on to Stonecreek Golf Club. The course is very conveniently located in the heart of Phoenix at 48th Street and Cactus Road. The course is very well maintained and the fairways and rough areas were both overseeded and very lush. The golf course gets a lot of play so the greens are a little beat up, but pretty good for a public course. Stonecreek wash runs throughout the course and creates a lot of problems, especially for those golfers that slice the ball off of the tee. From the Championship tees the course is 6,871 yards with a course rating of 72.8 and a slope rating of 131.

Once again I could not find anyone to play golf with me (this is becoming a trend!). So I decided to sign up as a single and take my chances with the pairings. I signed up for a 3 p.m. tee time. Playing with people that you do not know can be a little intimidating if you are an average golfer. You do not want to make a fool of yourself on the first tee. In this case, that was not a problem. I played with a father and his two sons. One son, Patrick, was 15 and the other son, Christian, was 13. They were good folks but none of them had played golf more than a couple of times. I played from the Championship tees, as did the father and older son. There were some very big swings and a couple of whiffs on the first tee before we got moving (and that was just me!). I walked and carried my bag. It was excruciatingly slow playing with this group but the groups ahead of us were not going any faster so somehow we were able to stay on pace. I was hitting the ball pretty well, but it was hard concentrating because of the time in between strokes (now I know how Chad feels playing with me!). After a while I just stopped keeping score and started hitting extra balls when time permitted (pretty much all of the time).

We made the turn at about 5 p.m. and I knew that there was no way we would finish 18 holes. Since there was no one teeing off on the No. 1 hole at this time, I decided to grab a cart and play the front 9 again. I bid farewell to my threesome and sped off. I hit the ball really well playing by myself and sped around the course in 1 hour and 10 minutes. I did not run into anyone until the 8th hole when I caught the single that started about 30 minutes before me. I puttered around on the 7th hole to let him finish the hole and then played in. I hit two balls off of most of the tees so I did not keep score, but I was making pars or bogeys with both balls (I did hit one ball into the Stonecreek wash). On the 9th hole, which is a 410 yard par-4, I hit my drive to 113 yards based on the GPS in the cart (the hole was actually playing 390 yards) and then stiffed my wedge to "gimme" range for a birdie.