A Cinderella story

Yes, the Horry Georgetown Technical College Turf Bowl team captured another championship at the Carolinas GCSA Conference and Show. That result proved familiar, identical on the surface to eight of the previous 19 trivial pursuits at the annual gathering. But the challengers were unexpected and their strategy provided what can be best described in hindsight as a rope-a-dope.

Oh, and the final question — the winning question — was far more goofball than curveball.

The Fighting Mole Crickets B team — Chase Garvey, 23, Harry Robishaw, 30, Josh Rownd, 33, and Alex Zaner, 25, three of them Turf Bowl rookies still in their first months of turf school — raised the championship trophy with 1,050 points, besting the North Carolina State University B and A teams, who finished with 1,000 and 801, respectively, and their A team classmates, who finished with 99.

The four agreed before hearing a single question that they would buzz in only if they were certain of an answer. That resulted in eight correct answers in 10 attempts in their first-round game, enough to qualify as a wild card with 1,300 points. Rownd said the team was more “focused on a point total than winning the round to get us through.”

Less than an hour later, they carried their strategy even further, answering only five questions — including just one of the first 23 from the board of 30 — four of them correctly. They trailed the N.C. State A team by 1,400 points with seven questions remaining, managing to close to within 700 before a 500-point miss by the Wolfpack whittled the gap to 200 entering the final.

“We kind of figured out before we started that we weren’t going to answer anything we were going to lose points on,” Garvey added. “If we could answer it, we would buzz in and give it a shot.”

“I think we were just waiting for the right questions to come our way,” Zaner said.

They found three of their four correct championship-game answers in “Bugs N’ Stuff,” which golf and sports turf management professor Ashley Wilkinson attributed to the course study provided by George McCauley, a biological sciences professor and entomologist. How else would a group with such a limited turf background know anything about nematodes?

But the trophy was won and lost thanks to the final question of the afternoon.

The category: Turfgrass Management in the Movies.

The question: Unforgettable assistant greenskeeper from 1980s movie Caddyshack.

“We knew going in it was going to be about Caddyshack,” Robishaw said. The Mole Crickets missed the answer — the Cinderella story Carl Spackler, of course — but so did two other teams. Only the N.C. State B team, who wagered all of their 500 points to double their score, figured it out. The Mole Crickets wagered 50 and held on for the win.

“This is the most impressed and proud I’ve been,” Wilkinson said. “This is the least I’ve been involved with the Turf Bowl in years, so the fact that these guys won is on them, not us. These guys, they did it on their own.”

The win is the ninth overall for Horry-Georgetown since the turn of the century, and the second thanks to a final question: Three years ago, a straightforward final asked for the most recent winner of the Old Tom Morris Award — the legendary Paul R. Latshaw. “And as luck would have it,” Wilkinson said, “one of our students had interned for Paul B. Latshaw that year and he had been talking about his dad winning the award.”

Who knows what the future holds for any of the four championship Mole Crickets or any of their 40 Turf Bowl counterparts. They all have an afternoon behind the buzzer, though, some more knowledge about the industry, another day to come at the conference, bright futures. So they got that goin’ for them, which is nice.

Matt Lawell’s is GCI’s managing editor.

CAROLINAS GCSA TURF BOWL CHAMPIONS

2000   Horry Georgetown

2001   Horry Georgetown

2002   Clemson

2003   Horry Georgetown

2004   Clemson

2005   North Carolina State

2006   Clemson

2007   Clemson

2008   Central Piedmont

2009   Horry Georgetown

2010   Clemson

2011   Sandhills

2012   Horry Georgetown

2013   Horry Georgetown

2014   Clemson

2015   Horry Georgetown

2016   Horry Georgetown

2017   Clemson

2018   Clemson

2019   Horry Georgetown