The man leans over his putt. Two of his playing partners stand a few feet behind him, watching his pink ball. He gives it about 2 feet of right-to-left break, and he taps it with his mallet putter. The hole is 8 feet away.
The ball will easily end up about 30 yards away.
Impossible.
Insane.
Ironman.
Every October, Gilbert Plains Country Club, in Gilbert Plains, Manitoba, puts on the year-end, four-person scramble tournament that features, according to Manitoba headcover manufacturer KNG Golf, “the hardest pin placements on the course and the tee blocks at the very back of the holes.” The entry fee was $200. The pink ball player had paid for the pain.
“The Ironman tournament is always an event that everyone at the club looks forward to,” said Scott McCallum, general manager at the Gilbert Plains Country Club, in a 2017 story written by 730 AM CKDM in Dauphin, Manitoba. “It’s a chance for the greenskeeper to get as nasty as he’d like to, and everyone that’s played here before knows how nasty the pins can be.”
The 2020 event, apparently, was nastier.
The greenskeeper “says he’s going to make this the most intense Iron Man golf tournament ever…” the course’s Facebook page wrote.
Indeed.
The man’s putt begins breaking to the hole. Which is maybe an inch from the fringe. Which is about a couple of feet from the start of a downslope.
The ball catches the back edge of the cup and spins out. One of the playing partners in the background jumps up when it does. Goodbye.
The ball picks up speed and begins its descent into golf hell. The man hilariously chases after it, wagging his putter at it as if he were scolding a young child. There was no mention of what the group scored on the 396-yard par-4 16th, but KNG Golf did write that one group took a 15 on the hole. A scramble 15.
“Some of the pins (especially this one on Hole 16) were absolutely torturous,” wrote KNG Golf on the Instagram post.