Golf Central

There are golf course groundskeepers who keep your courses nice and pretty, there are groundskeepers like Bill Murray's Carl Spackler, in Caddyshack, who hunt varmints and the right blend of Northern California sensimilla to the ends of the earth, and then there are humble hero groundskeepers like Dave Buckles and his crew in Rancho Bernardo, near San Diego, who do just that little bit more.
     Last week when flames from the California wildfires that claimed thousands of homes and billions of damage surrounded Buckles' course - the posh Rancho Bernardo Inn and its million-buck homes - superintendent Buckles and his crew didn't wait for the fire brigade. Flames fuelled by the dry Santa Ana winds were leaping about everywhere, but they grabbed whatever came to hand (hoses, hand tools, buckets of water, neighbours' swimming pools), risked life and limb, extinguished four fires in neighbouring backyards, built a makeshift firebreak on one side of the course, and are credited with saving at least six families' homes from burning to the ground.
     In typical modest hero fashion Buckles told the San Diego Union Tribune: "You just can't sit there and watch something burn like that. I'm proud of the way my guys jumped in. I didn't have to tell them to do anything, they just did it.”
     For the record, Buckles, 46, and his crew - Esteban Chavez, Jorge Rosales, Manuel Soto, Julio Montes, Alfonso Escutia, Jose Luis Valencia, Guillermo Heredia and Pedro Ramirez - started their shift that day at their normal 5.30 am only to find fire raging everywhere. For their heroism, they are getting attention not only from the local press, but from big-time chat show presenter Ellen DeGeneres and the Spanish-language network Telemundo, who are raving about the bravery of Buckles' mostly Mexican-born crew of labourers
     That's plenty of love from the press. But here's ours from IGWT in very wet, unscathed-by-fire Brighton. Well done lads!