Children’s Beach House first in line for 2015 fundraiser tournament announcements
March 20, 2015
I was wondering what I would be writing about this week, and then I checked my email inbox.
No worries.
The folks at Children’s Beach House in Lewes sent me a note announcing this year’s edition of their CBH Golf Classic, to be held Thursday, May 21 at the Jack Nicklaus Golf Course at The Peninsula on the Indian River Bay, Millsboro.
Lydia Chichester du Pont founded the Beach House in 1936 to provide a special summer place for children with special needs, such as polio, cerebral palsy, and orthopedic conditions, among other challenges. The House sits on a beautiful bit of acreage in Lewes, fronting the Delaware Bay.
My brother Tom spent a few summers as the water safety instructor at the Beach House in the 1970s. That experience helped inspire his long, successful career in special and elementary education.
This year’s tournament lead sponsor is Ellison Carey of Merrill Lynch, Dover, and there are plenty of other sponsorship opportunities, running from $500 to $10,000. Single golfers can register for $210, and foursomes can register together if desired.
The event begins with the opening of the driving range, followed by the shotgun scramble start at 11:30 a.m. At 5 p.m., there will be a Poolside Buffet with carving and pasta stations. If you’d like to attend the Buffet without playing golf, a $75 ticket will put you by the pool, with two beverage tickets.
For more information, go to the Beach House website, or call 302-655-4288.
For those who are planning additional Cape Region fundraiser golf tournaments, I will be happy to use this column to publicize them. Please give yourself plenty of time, at least a month, to give charitably inclined golfers a chance to put your event on their schedule.
The official start of golf season in Delaware is April 1, and so I also expect that Cape Region golf clubs will begin holding their own tournaments and weekly competitions shortly thereafter. As before, I am also happy to report those results in this space.
Mud will come off a towel, if you wash it
This is the wet season for Cape Region golf, with plugged and muddy balls the general rule and not the exception.
Golf towels are made for cleaning golf balls, but sometimes golfers are a bit reluctant to use these cloths for that purpose.
That reluctance to mess up an otherwise clean towel may have been the inspiration for the United States Golf Association’s recent Ruling of the Day.
The formal question asked if a golfer could clean his golf ball, after it landed on the putting surface, by simply rubbing it on the green.
Once again, perhaps based on unfortunate past experience, the USGA’s response was far more nuanced than a straightforward “Of course!”
The rules folks agreed that rubbing the ball on the green to clean it is okay, “provided the act is not for the purpose of testing the surface of the putting green.”
The USGA went on to discourage the practice, if only to calm potentially suspicious competitors:
“It is recommended that a ball be cleaned in other ways to eliminate any question as to the player’s intentions.”
Of course, your golf towel is not the only option to clean the mud off a golf ball. There’s usually a bit of rough just off the green that would also do the job, as well as other fabrics in the immediate vicinity.
However, if you use pants or a shirt for this purpose, you should probably make sure you’re the one wearing the shirt or the pants that remove the mud.
Some folks are kind of touchy that way.