Professional golfers must love playing in pro-ams. Get in a stress-free round of golf and know the course a bit better, have a few laughs with a couple of hackers and then top it all off with an evening of dinner and drinks in a scenic Hong Kong harbour-front restaurant. Problem is some of the hackers can be real hackers, high-rollers who are actually playing their first or second round of golf but whose ego forbids them from admitting it. Talk about slow.
And then there are the ultra-competitive hotshots who can actually play and want to try to show up the pro by out-driving him.
That stress-free round? Forget it, the pro is usually too busy going over yardage and reading the greens with the caddie, especially when it's the first time he has seen the course.
The free meal and drinks are nice but every tourney the pro plays in puts on a nice spread, so nothing new here.
'It can seem a bit redundant,' says Welsh golfer Bradley Dredge. 'But I have to say that this one in Hong Kong is one of the best. Sometimes it takes six hours to play a pro-am round, here it was four hours.'
The pro-am of the Omega Hong Kong Open at Fanling has become so popular they actually need two days to play it and, on day two, Dredge draws the short straw and gets to tee off with me at 8.06am. Also joining in are Frank, who is in electronics, and Bill, who is an I.T. guy.