A championship that should not have been played: Clee goes back-to-back at Southerness

That is the championship in three sentences, and everything else is commentary on it. David Clee won his second title in a row, by five shots, with a gross 101 — a score that in any ordinary week would not go near a trophy and on this afternoon was the lowest anybody managed. He did not win it by playing beautifully. He won it by still being there at the end.

Level after thirteen

Clee and Grahame Ingram came to the fourteenth tee dead level.

Both had ground their way to thirteen over par nett through thirteen holes — Clee from the first group out at ten o'clock, Ingram from the last at twenty past — and with five to play the championship was a match between two men who had been level on the card four separate times that afternoon without ever standing on the same tee.

Ingram made twelve.

The fourteenth is a 418-yard par four, stroke index eight, and into that wind it did not single him out. Of the seven players who completed it, the hole averaged 8.57 — four and a half over par. Four more did not complete it at all. Clee played it in five, took his stroke, and made a nett par. Seven shots changed hands on one hole, and the fourth Legs Open was effectively over.

The only man who could play the first

Clee had already done the hardest thing of the day, four hours earlier.

The opening hole averaged 7.73 for the field — nearly four over par on a 372-yard four. Eleven men played it; ten of them took six or more, and seven of them took eight or nine. Clee made five, took his stroke, and walked to the second tee at level par nett. He was the only player in the championship who did not lose ground on the first hole, and given the way the rest of the day went, that single score is as close as anything gets to explaining the winning margin.

It did not stay tidy. A seven at the second and another at the third put him four over, and an eight at the sixth undid a recovery that had briefly got him back. He turned in 52 — nine over nett — and came home in 49 for his 101.

Forty-nine is not a good inward half by any ordinary standard. On this afternoon it was the lowest anyone still holding a card came home in, equalled by Robert Hamilton and beaten by nobody.

The men who were winning, and then weren't

For most of the front nine the leaderboard did not belong to Clee at all.

Andy Lewis, off nine, was four over nett through three and level with him at the top. He picked up at the fifth and again at the sixth, and was out of the Main before the turn.

Colum Watters, off twenty-four, then led outright: six over through six holes, a shot clear of Clee. He made a four at the ninth and a three at the tenth. In between he picked up at the seventh and the eighth, and that was that.

Toby Stanton lasted longest of the challengers. Also off twenty-four, he was twelve over at the turn — three behind — and still only three adrift standing on the fourteenth tee. He walked off it without a score, and off the eighteenth the same way.

Three separate players held or shared the lead at some point on that front nine and not one of them returned a card. The fourteenth ended Ingram's challenge and Stanton's card on the same hole.

Attrition, and a withdrawal

Five players picked up: Colum Watters, Andy Lewis, Iain MacLeod, Toby Stanton and Stephen Magowan. In a wind like that, in a field of eleven, that is not carelessness — it is a golf course that had stopped being playable in any ordinary sense.

Alastair Campbell's day ended differently, and should be recorded differently. The man who won the inaugural championship in 2013 opened with a nine, played the 132-yard fourth, and withdrew injured. Two holes. He is not a no-return: he did not decline to finish, he was unable to.

Magowan's card is the strangest of them. He picked up four times, twice on each nine, and still finished with sixteen Stableford points — including the single best score of the championship, of which more below.

The course did not relent coming home. The sixteenth, 414 yards and stroke index four, averaged eight over the seven cards that survived it; two players took twelve there. The twelfth averaged 7.30, the third 7.22. Six of the eighteen holes played to more than three over par for the field.

The four good ones

In the 155 holes the field actually completed, exactly four scores were returned under par. All four are worth naming.

Scott Ingram, who had taken twelve at the sixteenth and eleven at the fourteenth and was by then playing for nothing but the walk in, made three at the 480-yard eighteenth — an eagle, and the only one of the championship.

Robert Hamilton and David Clee both birdied the same hole, fours at the last. Clee's, with his stroke, was a nett three — two under par on the final hole of the championship, by a man who had already won it.

And Stephen Magowan made three at the thirteenth: 436 yards, stroke index two, the hardest hole on the card. It was the only sub-par score anyone returned on a par four all day, and it came on a card that would not count.

Nobody broke par on a par three.

The double, and the title that moved

Clee's 101 was the lowest gross returned, so the Scratch title went to him as well — the Main and the Scratch in the same afternoon.

The Stableford finished level: Clee and Grahame Ingram both on twenty-two points. Under the rule that the Main champion does not also take the Stableford, the title went to Ingram, who therefore finished second in one competition and first in another on identical figures to the man who beat him. Mark Alston was third on twenty.

Alston deserves a line of his own. He signed for 128 — a thirteen at the fourteenth, a twelve at the eleventh, a ten at the sixth — and off twenty-four that was nett 104 and fourth place. On an afternoon when half the field stopped writing numbers down, he wrote down every one of his.

Back to back

Final standings, Main (nett): Clee +17 · G. Ingram +22 · Hamilton +30 · Alston +35 · S. Ingram +43. Five no returns, one withdrawal.

David Clee had won in 2015. Winning again at Southerness made him the first man to retain the Legs Open.

He won it by five. The fourteenth was worth seven. And the rest of it — eleven starters, five finishers, four scores under par in 155 holes, one man carried off after two — was a golf course and a gale agreeing that the fourth Legs Open should probably have waited for another day.