http://solent-art.co.uk/coastal/ This is what Shep’s golf swing looks like, in case you’re wondering why Tony and I didn’t win the qualifier.

accommodatingly On Wednesday afternoon, Tony and I played Shep and Ben, straight up, for the championship of the world. They’re way better than we are, but we thought their relative unfamiliarity with our course would give us an advantage. It didn’t. They closed us out on the sixteenth hole, so we introduced an important Sunday Morning Group concept: the Qualifying Tournament. The sixteen holes we’d just finished, Tony explained, had been a qualifier for the day’s real action, a two-hole match for the championship of the universe. The top two pairs from the qualifier—them and us, coincidentally—advanced to the final, and because the two of them had (technically) finished ahead of the two of us we let them tee off first.

Not everyone likes the Qualifying Tournament concept, but rules are rules. And, as it happened, I birdied the seventeenth, putting Tony and me one-up in the main event. “We press you for the fourth dimension,” Shep said. I birdied the eighteenth, too—but so did they. That made Tony and me the undisputed champions of the universe, but it halved the press and, therefore, left the space-time continuum intact.

Can anyone identify the course in the photo above? We played there a couple of weeks ago, thanks to some shrewd favor-trading by Shep, and to get to it we took a boat (see below). Correct answerers, if any, will qualify for the next round.