Ran into Jim and Kim Miscoe first thing on arrival TPC River Highlands. Jim is otherwise known as “the Mayor” of the Travelers Championship and is an exceptional personality, and now that he’s here, the cast is complete, with the exception of Chris Rogers who texted me yesterday saying he would certainly be watching on TV and hoping to see some outstanding marshaling!
Ran into Cece from my crew last year and had a wonderful conversation over breakfast. She is such a sweet person and is looking at retirement in four years from her high stress job at Travelers. It was fun to compare her plan with how I have been spending the past year in retirement.
Afterwards, I got a ride to the walking scorers trailer to search for Buddy Buder, the Walking Scorers Chair, to follow up on my conversation with Jim Horvath about possibly becoming a walking scorer. Unfortunately he was not there, but I got his number to be able to send him a text. Hopefully we’ll be able to connect later in the championship. From there, I went back to the Villa to see if Jeff could arrange for an earbud for my radio, which he was subsequently able to do. He is such a scrounging whiz. I then went to my car to spend about an hour, just relaxing in anticipation of the arrival of my family who I had arranged tickets for today. They came on property at 11 and texted me to meet them at the 17th green where we had a fun time watching several of the early twosomes hit some very nice shots. I then suggested that we move over to the first tee area where they could be positioned for about 30 minutes and get a sense of what the start of the tournament was like at the first hole for each group of golfers.
My assignment for today was with Ludwig Aberg and Sam Burns. My crew consisted of four experienced MA's: Julia, Bob, Brandon, and Babur (Bob). Even though we were positioned immediately in front of the largest group of the day, Rory and Keegan, our gallery was semi-light, and therefore easy to manage, especially with this very experienced crew. It was a great day up until the time I realized that I was missing my car key, which evidently had fallen out of my pocket when I was visiting with my family and seated on the hillside at the first tee. Trying not to panic, I held out hope that someone may have turned it into the lost and found. It was a nerve-racking situation through holes 5, 6, and 7, then I finally left to go over to the volunteer villa to check at the registration desk, where they informed where lost and found was located. They told me that they had received a report of a Nissan key being found, which was very encouraging. I then got a cart driver to take me over to the lost and found office and lo and behold was able to recover it. In hindsight, this was incredibly fortunate as I only had to step away from our group for the ninth hole, maybe 20 minutes tops. Everyone on my crew was excited that I had recovered my key and totally reassured me that they had managed the ninth hole in my absence. I had a new lease on life for the back nine consequently and it went extremely well. The pace of play bogged down on the back nine and there was a significant wait for most shots from the 11th hole on. Additionally, a very unusual circumstance had occurred in the morning when heavy winds had dislodged large tree branches onto the newly installed Treehouse beer pavilion at the fourteenth green. It was closed down for safety sake and probably won’t reopen for the remainder of the championship. Our round finished up in just over four hours nonetheless and it was a very pleasant day for all of us highly experienced marshals. I was proud of them all.
All photos courtesy of Adam Mitchell
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