Four men played eighteen holes for nothing: rain takes the 2018 Legs Open apart

Gullane No. 2 — Sunday 12 August 2018

Seven of the thirteen who started the sixth Legs Open returned no card. Four of them played all eighteen holes.

That is the championship, and it is not really a story about golf. The rain that fell on Gullane did not so much beat the field as dissolve the means of recording what they did. Paper scorecards came apart in pockets. The digital scoring went down. And the last group out — Colum Watters, Owen Watters, John Lyle and Paul Wright — walked the whole course with no way of returning a single hole.

The group that had nowhere to write it down

They went out at 11.40, last of four. By the time they reached the first green the cards were already going, and whatever they made there could not be written down. Nor could anything after it.

The digital scoring, which existed precisely for a day like this, failed too. So the four of them played on in the rain with no paper and no phone, in a championship that could no longer see them. Eighteen holes, four players, seventy-two holes of golf between them, and not one stroke of it enters the record.

They are no returns rather than no shows, and the distinction matters. They played. There was simply no surviving evidence of it by the time they walked off the eighteenth.

Magowan, three under and gone

The weather did not, in the end, wreck the scoring for those who could still write. The field played the course to 21.4 shots over par — very slightly better than Dalmahoy in the dry the year before, and a different sport entirely from the 42.3 the gale produced at Southerness in 2016. Gullane in a downpour was survivable. It was the paperwork that drowned.

Stephen Magowan certainly survived it early. Off twelve, he made a three at the second — a gross birdie with a stroke, so a nett eagle — and stood two under after two holes. A nett par run to the sixth took him to three under, a mark only one round in the championship's record has bettered: Alastair Campbell, five under through fourteen at Carnwath in 2013. Magowan had reached three under once before himself, at Dalmahoy twelve months earlier. He is the only man to have got there twice.

It did not hold. A six at the seventh cost two, the eighth another, and by the turn he was back to level. A seven at the thirteenth finished the charge properly. He signed for 87, nett 75, four over — second.

Alston leads, and then the sixteenth

The most unlikely name to sit at the top of this championship spent most of the afternoon there.

Mark Alston, off twenty-four, was level par nett after the first, level after four, and grinding along around one or two over for the whole middle of his round. He made a three at the third, birdied nothing else all day, and simply refused to go backwards. At 14.20, one over through thirteen, he led the sixth Legs Open outright.

Then he took seven at the fourteenth and eleven at the sixteenth.

The sixteenth is a par five and stroke index four, and in those conditions it played to an average of 7.14 — over two shots above its par, the second hardest hole on the course after the brutal stroke-index-one fourth (6.22 on a par four). Alston's eleven there was worth four shots on its own. He walked off it seven over, having been one over three holes earlier, and finished fifth.

Burns wins it with a nett birdie at the last

David Burns, also off twenty-four, did none of the leading and all of the winning.

His round contains a nine at the sixth and an eight at the sixteenth — the same hole that had just taken Alston apart — and he was three over standing on the seventeenth tee, one behind where he'd been an hour earlier. What he had that nobody else did was a finish.

He made three at the fifteenth for a nett two. He parred the seventeenth. And at the last he made four, took his stroke, and signed for a nett birdie: nett 73, two over, the championship by two shots.

Nobody who finished ahead of him at any point in the afternoon was still ahead of him at the end.

Four birdies in the whole championship

Gullane gave up almost nothing. Across every card returned there were exactly four sub-par scores and no eagles:

• Magowan's three at the second
• Alston's three at the third
• George Burns' three at the seventh
• Craig McMahon's two at the short fifth

McMahon's is the one to dwell on: he picked up at the third, so his card was already dead when he holed that putt at the fifth. He played the remaining fifteen holes anyway and returned a 22-point Stableford card that counted for something even though his round could not.

Robert Hamilton's day ended differently again. He was round the front nine in 45, five over nett, and then picked up at every single hole on the back — nine consecutive no returns. Colin Howieson lost his card at the seventh, the tenth and the sixteenth but played on and finished with 21 points.

The titles

Main: David Burns, nett 73, +2, by two from Magowan.

Scratch: George Burns, whose 86 was the lowest gross returned.

Stableford: Burns topped the points as well on 34, but the Main champion cannot take the Stableford, so the title passes to Stephen Magowan on 32 — the man he beat by two in the Main.

Final standings, Main (nett): D. Burns +2 · Magowan +4 · G. Burns +5 · Clee +6 · Alston +7 · Cruickshanks +12. Seven no returns.

Six cards from thirteen starters is the worst return rate in the championship's history — worse even than the gale at Southerness, where five of eleven failed to finish. But the comparison flatters Gullane, because Southerness beat its field with golf. This one beat it with stationery.

Somewhere in the record there is a four-ball who played eighteen holes at Gullane No. 2 in a monsoon and whose scores exist nowhere at all. Whatever they shot, they shot it in conditions that took the championship's ability to watch them away entirely.