The FM Championship    Wednesday   August 28, 2024   ProAm

Even though I'd always volunteered as a mobile/walking/marshal/ambassador to date since 2009, I'd secretly desired to see if I could try working as a walking scorer at one of these tournaments.   I'd never been selected for the walking scorer committee in 19 championships; it was always a coveted closed committee at every FedEx and USGA event.  When the LPGA announced a return to New England at TPC Boston I got my chance to see if scoring was as challenging but rewarding as I'd hoped it would be.  

It was.

I completed three power point training sessions coordinated by the LPGA to become familiar with the scoring device, but seeing a depiction on my laptop still left me with some doubts about actually entering the data out on the course, in the moment of play, without any mistakes.  Thankfully I had my Travelers fellow mobile ambassador Mike T's encouraging words in my head from back in June saying "You can handle it, Morty!"  

 Some initial impressions about the FM Championship on arrival for the ProAm:                                  They were not ready to host a top-tier professional golf tournament, the build-out of the infrastructure wasn't complete, the concession stands weren't stocked, most of the "Fan Zone" attractions had yet to be set-up, and speaking of fans, there weren't any!  No spectators for the ProAm, invited family members and their guests only, Huh!?  In hindsight, this wasn't entirely surprising as the lead-up to the FM had been lightly publicized, particularly to potential volunteers in the local area.  As a result, there were significant vacancies in various committees, most notably hole marshals, and even walking scorers.  During the week prior to the FM start we were receiving emails encouraging us to recruit our friends to come and help out. There was a noticeable limited number of marshals at nearly every tee and green.  

I won't bore you with the details of getting everything I needed to step out on the course and start my job, but I'll just say the process was not real smooth, leaving me wondering if this was going to be a sink-or-swim moment.  Finally with 20 minutes to teetime, I had my scoring device and radio in hand and thankfully had a very short walk over to #10 tee where I would be meeting Allisen Corpuz and the 4 amateurs in our group. Thankfully they would be playing a scramble, requiring me to keep track of a single team score, rather than 5 running scores on my device.  This proved to be scoring on training wheels as entering each stroke was pretty slow during this six-hour ProAm.  The pros play only nine holes, switching off at the turn but the ams continue for a full 18.  Both Allisen Corpuz and Annie Park were USC grads, my alma mater, which gave me a reason to initiate some conversation with each of them at the start of their respective 9's.  They were both very pleasant, Annie Park being the more chatty of the two, and I ended up talking to her 4-5 times throughout the round as we walked the fairways and elevated wooden cart paths, and while being carted to the more distant holes.  She asked where I was from, and even talked about some mutual experiences we each had at USC, ie., seeing football at the Coliseum.  I told her I'd attended graduate school for Occupational Therapy and she immediately mentioned having some OT students in her Communications classes.  

We were later joined by Jeff, who introduced himself as Annie Park's agent and accompanied us for most of her 9 hole round.  He was a terrific guy, had a conversation with every one of us in our group, even asking me details about my background and stating that the walking scoring volunteers played a vital part in LPGA events.  He had just returned from the AIG at St. Andrews, stayed at the Dunvegan, played the Old Course, so we compared our mutual experiences and agreed it was golf heaven.  

The four Ams were a mixture of guys of varying golf ability, but the atmosphere was pretty relaxed and non-competitive; we knew that the winning team was something like -17, (our group was -7).  The interaction with them was great as well, questions to me about where I was from, my volunteering background, where I play golf at Captains on Cape Cod.   It was a strange ProAm however in that the lack of spectators meant no noise from the ropes, no requests for autographs or photos, no verbal encouragement, shout-outs, not even any good-natured heckling of the Ams.  FM needs to correct this for next year's event.  Nonetheless it was just terrific to be right there with the players, having to closely focus on each shot to correctly record it in the scoring device, which made watching the golf much more meaningful. I never had a glitch or a problem with the entire process, but I also realized that tomorrow's actual competion with three players would be more challenging and serious.