Two Perfect Cards, and an Awkward Question

Jimmy Gurney and Jordan Jabbori both went ten for ten and split the pot. They played the same three matches with the stakes rotated — Gurney four on Red in match 2, four on Red in match 6, two on Red in match 7; Jabbori four, four and two across the same three in a different order — and Red won all three. Nobody else broke eight.

Seven cards finished on 8: Tom Bres, Ron George, Adam Hackett, Dennis Hackett, Ron George Sr., Bill George and Bob Walters. Jon DeAngelis took 7, Mark Williams and Rick Gordon 6. Six cards finished on 4, two on 2, and John Waldron, in his first Cup, managed nought — he backed Blue in matches 1 and 6 and Red in match 4, and all three went the other way.

Match 7 decided it

The whole pool turned on the afternoon alternate shot between Adam Hackett and Will Bass in blue and Jabbori and Jamie Grace in red. The board made Blue a 4–3 favourite, and exactly two cards in the field took Red: Gurney's two points and Jabbori's four. Red won it 2 up, and that is the entire margin between the two winners and the seven men tied behind them.

The board got six of ten right. It read the morning well, calling four of the five Four-Ball matches, and read the afternoon badly, missing three of five Foursomes. The worst of it was match 5: Red went off a 2½–1 favourite carrying 24 points, the second-biggest pile on the board, and Mark Williams and Ron George won 5&4, the widest margin of the day.

Both of the long prices came in for the favourite, which is the opposite of what this column suggested on Friday. Match 10 at Blue 6–1 finished Blue 4&3 exactly as the money said, costing Brad Juday the two points he had alone on Red; match 3 at Blue 5–1 finished Blue 1 up, costing Vince Olenik his two. So much for the record book: Frank George and Rick Gordon, the 5–1–1 partnership nobody would touch, lost to a pair who had been 3–3–1.

The awkward part

Both winning cards were written by me. Gurney and Jabbori hadn't sent picks in, so under the rule in the email I filled them in from a sentence of description each — a Spartan who doesn't carry a hedge, and a rookie who follows the man who brought him. Both cards backed Red in the two matches those men were actually playing, and both of those matches came in.

In fairness to everyone else: the picks were made blind, before a single other card had been seen, and they were published here in full before a ball was struck. In fairness to the suspicious: the other two cards I wrote finished on 8 and 4, so the method is hardly infallible. Make of it what you will, preferably at the bar.

Five All, and Three Matches Decided on the Last Green

Blue won the morning 3–2, Red won the afternoon 3–2, and the 33rd Concord Cup goes into Sunday level at five apiece. It is the seventh time in thirty-three Cups that Saturday has finished square, and the second running. Of the six before it Blue took four, but the honest answer is that a level Saturday tells you nothing at all — in the twenty-six Cups where somebody did lead overnight, that side went on to win twenty-two times. Tomorrow starts from nothing.

The morning

Four of the five Four-Ball matches were still alive at the 16th and three of them went to the 18th green. Match 1 was the wildest: Roger Blake, filing dispatches all day, had Red three up after three holes and summed it up as "they are kicking our ass." Blue got it back to all square by the 8th, led at the turn, and were level again at the 11th before Jon DeAngelis and Ron George Sr. edged clear. Blake's last two posts tell the story — "Ron Sr. carrying the red team," then, at the end, "Well played Ron Sr!" Red by one.

Match 2 swung as hard. Bill George birdied the 6th to square it, Jordan Jabbori made a par that was good enough for a birdie on the 8th, and Jimmy Gurney — never knowingly modest in the feed — filed "Jimmy playing lights out." Red went three up by the 13th before Bill George birdied the 14th and the 15th in succession, earning the nickname Birdman in Gurney's running commentary, to get it back to one. Red held on, 1 up.

Match 3 turned on putts of the kind that make a man want to lie down. Brad Juday won the second hole with a putt that, in two separate accounts, "stayed on the edge of the cup for a couple seconds and then rolled in." Tom Bres answered with what Bob Walters called a great par at the 6th, and the two of them traded net pars in what the feed recorded as an "absolute pillow fight on 5." Red nosed ahead around the turn; Blue took the lead back at the 16th and held it. Blue by one.

Match 4 was Jamie Grace narrating his own decline. Will Bass put one to eighteen inches, prompting "Will again…", and when the Blue pair went three up at the 11th Grace's entire report was a single unprintable syllable. He then made an eight-footer, got it back to one with three to play, and ran out of holes. Blue by one.

Match 5 was the only morning match that wasn't close, and the only one the board got badly wrong. Red went off a 2½–1 favourite; Mark Williams and Ron George won 5&4. Ron George holed from forty feet on the 6th, Rick Gordon answered from twenty-five on the 7th, and after that it was all Blue. The closing note, on Williams: "Remmo pars 14 to close. Remmo played great the whole time."

The afternoon

Red took the alternate shot 3–2 and it was the two biggest Blue stroke allowances that went down. Match 6 gave Blake and John Waldron eleven shots, the largest allowance of the weekend, and they changed the lead seven times in the first ten holes — Waldron produced what Blake called "another side door" to square it at the 7th — before Gurney and DeAngelis pulled away after the turn. Red 3&1.

Match 7, the one the whole parimutuel hung on, changed hands nine times. Blue led by two at the 7th, Red led by two at the 13th, it was all square again at the 15th, and Jabbori and Grace won the last to take it 2 up. Match 8 was almost as tight for thirteen holes — Ron George Sr. holed from fifteen feet to halve the 11th — before Red ran out the 3&2 winners.

Blue's two came early and never wobbled. Match 9 opened with a scene Bill George reported in full: "Billy hits into water on one, Brad also hits into water. Art hits in water on two, DH also hits in water. All square." From that start Juday and George went four up by the 9th and won 4&3 — against Bres and Dennis Hackett, who came in 6–1–0 as a Foursomes pair and were the one thing on the board the betting money was sure about. Match 10 was the same shape: Bob Walters and Mark Williams three up by the 6th and home 4&3 over Frank George and Rick Gordon.

From the feed

The check-in page took 182 posts across the day from the first tee to the last green, and the best of them had nothing to do with the golf. The opening entry, the night before, was Roger Blake asking what time anybody was actually teeing off. The first score posted on Saturday morning was Glenn Peggs filing a result for a match that hadn't started, followed by "ignore Glenn score update" and, from Grace, "Glenn is trying." And the single best thing anyone wrote all weekend arrived on Friday afternoon: "On #4 Glenn picked my ball up from the fairway and threw it backward 70 yards under a tree. He has a pretty good arm." To which Frank George replied, "Good to hear Peggs arm is in good shape."

Bob Goes Down, Vinnie Goes Up: Reading the 2026 Handicap Sheet

Twenty-one players, an average handicap of 13.7, a median of 11, and a spread from Rick Gordon and Jimmy Gurney at 7 to Ron George Sr. at 24. That's the 2026 field, and it's the highest field average since 2017. Three years ago the Cup average bottomed out at 11.4, the lowest in the event's history; it has climbed back every year since. Nearly a quarter of this year's field is a 20 or higher, the largest share since 2015, even while 38 percent are still single digits. The middle is disappearing: this is a field of low handicaps and high ones.

The headline mover is Bob Walters. In 2018 he played off 21, his career worst. Since then it has gone 16, 16, 15, 11, 10 and now 8 — the lowest number of his 26 Cups, and eight strokes better than he was in 2021. Nobody in the field has moved that far in that direction. His career average is 15.5, so the man teeing it up this October is playing about seven strokes better than his own career norm.

Running the other way is Vince Olenik. Vinnie arrived in 2001 at a 3 and got to a 2 in 2002, and for years he was the scratch-level yardstick everyone else was measured against; his career average of 5.9 is still the lowest of anyone in this year's field. He comes in at 11 this time, the highest of his 25 Cups. It's a gentle slope — 10, 10, 10, 11, 9, 11 across the last six — but the direction is unmistakable, and the strokes are starting to flow the other way.

They're not alone in either direction. Jimmy Gurney is at 7, his best ever and eight shots better than the 15 he brought to his first Cup in 2016. Jon DeAngelis, in his 32nd Cup, matches the best number of his career at 11, first set back in 1996. Will Bass has gone 21 to 11 since 2018, and Rick Gordon keeps hovering around his 2023 career low of 5. On the other side of the ledger, Brad Juday has drifted from 15 in 2021 to 19 now, Mark Williams has sat at 21 for three straight years, and Frank George is back up to 21 after an 18 last fall.

The longest arc in the data belongs to Dennis Hackett. He played the first Cup in 1994 off a 7. Thirty-one Cups later he's a 15, having touched 16 in 2022. Tom Bres has gone the other way lately, 24 in 2024 down to 20 now, and Ron George Sr., first seen in 1997 at 17, has settled in at 24 for the third year running. Meanwhile Ron George, the only man to play all 33 Cups, has barely budged: 13 as a rookie, 7 at his best in 2012, and an 8 this year.

Four players in this field weren't here last fall. Matt Haas returns at 8 after sitting out 2025, close to the 6 he carried in 2023. Roger Blake is back for his third Cup, and remarkably he has been a 21 in every one of them — 2021, 2024 and 2026. The two newcomers are John Waldron at 19 and Jordan Jabbori at 12, which lands Jabbori right on the field's median. Seven players from last year's rosters aren't in this one, and the field has shrunk from 24 to 21.

By team, Red carries the higher average at 14.2 to Blue's 13.2, so on balance the strokes will flow from Blue to Red. History says Blue shouldn't mind. Across every Cup match ever played, players at 9 or better have won 53 percent of the time and those at 20 or above just 45 percent, with the 15-to-19 group at 48. The strokes narrow the gap; they don't erase it. Which is worth remembering when the pairings go up and somebody complains that he's giving away too many.