E.H. Coaches’ Golf Outing ‘Tough to Top’
The East Hampton Coaches Association’s coffers benefited to the tune of $10,000 from a golf outing Saturday at the South Fork Country Club in Amagansett.
Rain had been forecast, but it was, wonderful to tell, a sunny day, and spirits were bright.
“The last time here [two years ago], I hit a horse,” Lou Reale, East Hampton High’s softball coach, said before the golf cart brigade of foursomes set out.
Matt Maloney, the girls lacrosse coach, looked confident inasmuch as he had brought with him the same two ringers who had helped his foursome win at South Fork in 2010.
Maloney’s fourth was John Pizzo, whose daughter, Maggie, stars at midfield for the girls team. And while, according to his own account, Pizzo didn’t play his best golf that day, he wound up as the most envied person at the post-tourney buffet given the fact that he won the “Trip-of-a-Lifetime” raffle offering a trip for two to any one of this country’s 13 major sporting events, or to Hawaii, the Caribbean, or Alaska.
“Your call got me to thinking,” Pizzo said Monday morning. “Mimi and I have been blessed — I’ve done well as a builder despite these very tough times. We’ve traveled to a lot of nice places, and I know Matt is getting married in December. So, I’m giving this trip to him. . . . He’s such a sports nut though that I think I’ll let his wife choose where to go. Otherwise, they may wind up in a basketball court at their honeymoon.”
The Maloney quartet did not win this time; it finished third at one-under. The top prize, despite a Calloway handicapping system designed to even out ringers’ scores, went to the five-under foursome of Claude Beudert, coach of championship East Hampton golf teams, Barry Mackin, Arthur Goldman, and Gene Colleary, a retired teacher whose game revived after he got a new hip two years ago. “Before I had that operation,” he said, “I couldn’t walk from the first tee to the first green here.”
The runners-up were Bill McKee, who, with Rich King, helped organize the outing, Mike Petrie, Steve Waxman, and Peter Bistrian, who by himself had lined up 30 sponsors.
Reale, whose perennially strong softball teams attest to the efficacy of the six-step swing that he teaches, said, when told there was a book out now called “The Eight-Step Golf Swing,” that he had “a zero-step golf swing. . . . No, I didn’t hit a horse this time, but I put three balls into the pasture.”
Nobody won a new Buick, which would have gone to anyone with a hole-in-one on the par three ninth hole, a feat that this newspaper’s Irene Silverman, who described it as “kind of a miracle,” happened to accomplish on Sept. 6.
“We’re very appreciative,” said McKee, “that South Fork gave us their course to use on a Saturday. We had corporate sponsors, hole sponsors, golf cart sponsors, and there were individual donations. . . . The whole community got behind it. This is our seventh year holding this tournament. This one will be tough to top.”
The proceeds, McKee added, would go toward the two scholarships the coaches association gives out at the high school’s athletic awards dinner in June, “and to any kids — they don’t necessarily have to be athletes — we hear about who are in need.”