Lo Sport (Golf)

It’s amazing how important contacts are in life! Yet again the name Nicola Albini appears in Florentine Braheem as someone whose acquaintance has been priceless (If the name is not ringing a bell, Nicola introduced us to his mom who not only found the castle for us, but also introduced us to Alex our tour guide).

Nicola is a member of a golf and country club in Prato called Le Pavoniere. The course was designed by Arnold Palmer and during the week of October 16th played host to the European “Challenge Tour”. For those not familiar, the Challenge Tour is the equivalent of the Nationwide Tour in the US and has some fairly well known European golfers playing in its tournaments every week.

About one week before the tournament, I was invited by Nicola to dust off my clubs (I have played once in the past three months) and play in the Pro Am on Sunday! As the day approached my initial enthusiasm and participating in this event became tempered by my daily viewing of the Florence weather report on Yahoo.com which showed that a major storm from Russia was making its way South to our neck of the woods! As I stood on the driving range practicing, I asked myself “Why the hell are you here today”. I proceeded to shank a couple of thin five irons right, leaving my hands vibrating in pain and wondered if this was going to be as long of a day at the course as it appeared! Tee-time was for 9:30 and when I walked to the box on nine, the temperature reading was “8” degrees Celsius (Not including wind chill and winds were ranging between 25 and 40 miles an hour)! For those unfamiliar with the temp conversion, that pencils out to 45 degrees back home. I yeah, I forgot to mention that it was also “Spitting” rain periodically throughout the day!

Needless to say, I got off to a bad start with a double on a par five. All toll, I shot a 48 on the front nine, managed to play the last five holes of the day even par and walked into the club house posting a 91 (All things considered not bad given the lay off and the wicked conditions). The course played longer than its measured 6100 meters (About 6800 yards) and has a 72.4 rating with a 137 slope (Sorry about all the golf jargon gang but if I don’t put it in, guys like Jim Jones will e-mail me with lots of questions :>).

The real magic of the day was my interaction with my playing partners and some of the European pros that I met. The pro in my group was Filepe Aguilar from Chile. He is number two on the money list for the Challenge Tour and currently ranked 146th in the world. Due to his status on the Challenge Tour he is a shoe in for the European Tour next year and has a good chance at making the British Open in 2008. More importantly he was an extremely cool guy, giving tips to our other partner Paolo who struggled all day and made me look decent!

Following the round, as is typical in the US, there was a nice buffet lunch. The difference was that this one was “Italian Style”! With all the fix’ns (Pasta, Ribs, salami, cheeses, red wine, more pasta, pork chops, the list goes on!). Well, old Felipe invited me to eat as his table which was filled with all of the pros from Latin America including two from Mexico Daielle Leon and Pablo Rosas and a couple from Spain and Argentina whose names I didn’t catch. Here I was, the only American at the table and a complete “Hack” talking golf with a bunch of pros from around the world!

At days end I walked to the parking lot with my bag and ran into another European Pro named Klas Erikson from Sweden. I asked him how his day was and his response: “I haven’t played in this type of cold in nearly a year!” This coming from a Sweed validated my feelings about the conditions!