Evans Prairie and Lopez Legacy country club teams survived a soggy semifinal round Tuesday to move on to the finals of the 2014 Men’s Village Cup, one of the community’s most popular golf tournaments.
Rain and lightning again played havoc with the golfers, causing long delays until the matches were called about 5 p.m. Last week, rain wiped out the semifinals and they were postponed to Tuesday.
Only one pair of golfers finished all 18 holes in the match between Cane Garden and Evans Prairie. When the points were added, Evans Prairie had 9½ to 6½ for Cane Garden.
In the other match, Lopez Legacy won with 11½ points to 4½ points for loser Tierra del Sol. Points are awarded based on the results of individual match-ups.
“We were down for 2½ hours,” said Dave Peake, a tournament organizer. “We wanted to get back out there.”
The two-day tournament finals begin Wednesday with best ball followed by individual play on Thursday. Peake said about 200 golfers participated this year.
“We can’t control the weather in Florida,” said George Bell, coach of the winning Lopez Legacy team. He said more storm cells were nearby when the matches were called.
Losing Cane Garden coach Ron Clark said five of his individual match-ups were tied and the result could have gone the other way if the round continued. His team members had “a lot of disappointed faces,” he said, but they understood that play had to be stopped.
Clark said he can’t recall weather problems this bad during the 11 years he’s played in the tournament. The Village Cup began about 20 years ago.
Evans Prairie, the newest Villages country club, fielded a team for the first time this year with a new Villager as its coach.
Coach Russ Jimeson moved to The Villages a month ago from Minnesota, where he was an amateur golf champion. He also once played on the Ohio State University team with professional golfers Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf.
“We would rather have played it out,” he said of his team’s victory in the rain-shortened tournament. “We would have preferred to win by getting the best score.”
After the semifinal matches ended, Bell and Jimeson huddled to work out their individual match-ups for the finals. Because the tournament teams are balanced, Jimeson said he doesn’t expect a blowout by either Lopez Legacy or Evans Prairie.
“It’s going to be a very tight match,” he said.
