Can we make it 1 year without injury?

Seriously, can we make it just one year without illness or injury to one of us?

2014, Laurance broke his leg.

2015, I sprained my ankle

2016, Laurance broke his 5th metacarpal in his right hand

2017, I severed the ligament in my left thumb, both lungs collapsed during surgery, I was diagnosed with Hashimotos Disease, I developed Alopecia from the stress and I found out I had gallstones.

2018, we watched my MIL go through Dementia, a leg amputation and ultimately her death. I had my gallbladder removed (one of the stones near the entry to the bile duct was the size of a golf ball)

2019, while at work, Laurance put his back out and was out for a few weeks.

Here we are now in 2020, so far, we've found out that I've got degenerative disease in my right hip and shoulder as a result of the car accident and that the degenerative disease in my spine has gotten worse. My spine has also shifted. What does the degenerative disease in my shoulder and hip mean? I will eventually have to have both replaced. If that isn't enough, we're dealing with a f&cking pandemic.

2018 into 2019 was a great year for us with golf. We both saw our handicaps dropping, we played in some major tournaments, we represented our club through pennants and we played in a national tournament at 3 levels.

In 2018, I had my best stableford score ever. 47 points. My handicap since I got it kept going up and down. The lowest I'd ever gotten to was 39 and then it would go back up to 45 again because of another illness or injury. When I got my 47 points, I was playing off 41. That win caused my handicap to drop 3 shots over night. Runner up that day was hubby who came in with 36 points.

That was the start of the handicap decline for me.

December 2018, Laurance and I partnered up with 2 of our Juniors at the club to play in the Volkswagen Scramble qualifier.

We won beating the runners up by 3 strokes. That meant in March 2019, we were playing in the Regional Final at Riverside Oaks for a chance to play in the Championship final in Queensland.

The Volkswagen Scramble (formerly Holden Scramble) is a PGA sponsored event.

One of our Juniors, Chazz, couldn't play at the Regionals because of school commitments so we had Sean fill in for him.

We were given a team handicap of 7.3. Joining us at the Regional Final was our Club Pro, Dave. We came in with a whopping 15 under off the stick to give us a nett score of 47.7. That should be enough to win right?

Wrong! During presentations, we found out that we got done on a countback. Another team came in with the exact same score and the exact same handicap. We went from the happiest bunch of assholes this side of the nut house to depressed monkeys looking for bananas in a heart beat.

Absolutely gutted, we made our way home. We just pulled into the driveway when I get a call from our Pro Dave.

"We won! We won! THEY F&CKED UP THEIR SCORING! WE WON! WE'RE GOING TO QUEENSLAND"

Here's what happened. At Regionals, every team that plays nominates someone from their club as a designated marker who then marks the card for another team. The marker and the Pro do the score card together and BOTH have to sign off on it before handing the card in. So what happened? The marker was putting the scores down on the wrong holes. You see, it's a shotgun start so we're all starting on different holes. We for example, started on the 12th hole at Regionals and our marker was from Duntry Leagues Golf Club.

So, because of this massive f&ck up, they were disqualified and we rightfully took our place in top spot.

This means now, we're heading to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland to play in the Championship Finals.

Laurance does his back in just weeks before we're due to play the final and our other Junior doesn't want to come to Queensland.

Here we are now looking to replace Matteen and wondering what's going to happen if Laurance can't play. We've paid our registration fees and they're non-refundable.

We get Bill to fill in for Matteen and those at the PGA said all Laurance has to do is knock his ball off the tee and we take 3 of those as his shots for them to count and we'll be good.

Laurance has been off work about 6 weeks because of his back. He's gone through physio several days a week to get himself better. He's doing his stretches and exercises and they have even worked golf into part of his rehab. He gets the all clear the day before we're set to fly to Queensland to play in the final.

Now, the final is 4 days of golf and activities. You are going non stop the entire time. We get to Brisbane and are shuttled by bus to the Twin Waters Resort on the Sunshine Coast. We grab our golf clubs off the bus, take them out of the luggage bags, put the luggage bags back on the bus and leave our clubs out front while we go register and get our welcome packages. While we're going through our registration, our luggage is taken to our rooms for us and our clubs are taken to the golf cub and put on the carts where they will stay for the entirety of our time there.

After registration is done, we get shuttled to the golf club (which is on the very far end of the resort) where we have a 1pm shot gun start for our practice round. Lunch packs are waiting in the carts for us.

We finished our practice round, had a few drinks at the club and back to the resort we went to officially check in and see where we'd be sleeping for the next few days. We didn't have much time between golf and the welcome dinner/presentation so it was a quick look around the room, shower, change and back to the golf club for dinner and drinks.

Round 1, we met our marker for the weekend. The PGA photographer took a few photos of our team to at the first hole. We didn't play too badly. We came in with a respectable score.

Round 2. This determines if you play for the championships or the consolation prize. You needed to finish in the top 24 to qualify for the championships. We finished in 9th spot to qualify for the championships.

Round 3, the final. It's the 4th full day of golf with little to no sleep, way too much food and alcohol. We played our game and finished 12th over all. That means we finished in the top half in all of Australia. We were pretty happy with that.

It's been 28 years since the Scramble first started now. This year, because of the CoronaVirus Pandemic, it's not looking like the finals are going to happen. Regionals were suspended and finals should be taking place in May.

The stats as of last year for the Scramble were:

Over 1 million people have played at club level in 27 years and only 3000 have ever played in the Championship Finals.

Since then, both mine and Laurance's handicaps have just been on a steady decline.

We've both been playing some pretty bad golf again lately (we'll blame the pandemic because we can) so our handicaps are going back up again.

I got down to play off 23 just before Christmas and Laurance got down to 17.