Family that plays together - well, plays together

Regular visitors to our weekly tour updates may well remember the story from a few weeks back of 12-year-old Joe O'Connor, whose joint managerial ventures with his father, Michael, were meeting with decidedly mixed fortunes.

In week 12 of the Golf Masters, O'Connor junior had just taken the unilateral decision to dump Colin Montgomerie from one the household's teams, and Monty had gotten his own back by going out and winning the week's European tour event. Another of the O'Connors' sides, however, Joey's Dream Team 1, had topped the weekly leaderboard, and for that the father and son partnership won themselves a day out with two guests at Mount Juliet.

The big day had to be postponed until Joe got over a chipped bone in his knee, but, after a few brisk walks around the back garden to make sure the injury was on the mend, the necessary arrangements have now been made and Michael's brother, Maurice, is one of those who has been roped in to make up the numbers at the Co Kilkenny course next month.

Uncle Maurice, it seems, is now in rather a strong position to return the favour, for six weeks after the family first struck the big time on our tour, he has bagged their second weekly prize: his Team 25271 beat its closest challenger, Palmer 4, into second place by almost £9,000.

Maurice, we're happy to say, put a good deal more thought into his team selection than into its name, and his efforts were rewarded this week by the efforts of Jose-Maria Olazabal, Peter Baker, Larry Mize and David Carter, who between them picked up £370,750 over the course of last weekend, with the small change required to bring the total up to £372,250 being contributed Padraig Harrington and Marc Farry. Billy Mayfair decided to take it easy.

"Is this a wind up?" inquired Maurice when we rang to give him the good news, showing, perhaps, the effects of having been mocked for his underachievement over the past month and a half. Suitably reassured that we were in fact "on the level", he promptly assumed the tone of a man who had an urgent call to make, something along the lines of "Ah Michael, get yourself and that young lad of yours ready, I'm on my way around and I've got some news!"

What makes the whole thing even more odd is that the whole O'Connor clan, prior to their becoming regulars down at Thomastown at least, tend to do their golfing up at Laytown Bettystown, a club which produced yet another of our recent weekly winners, one Gerry Wickham, who slipped back fractionally to 11th place overall this week but who is still very much in the running for the overall top prize.

Making the running for the 10 big ones, however, is one of the competition's old friends, Robert Sinnott from Sutton. Sinnott first came to our attention last year when he had the laptop on which he stored details of all his teams stolen from the back of his car. He got in touch with a request for a copy of his teams in database form.

Some of his suggestions were also taken into account when we fine tuned the rules during the close season, and the man seems to have taken full advantage of our tinkerings.

The Dubliner had a fine weekend at Druid's Glen and the Greater Hartford Open, with his The Sixties team picking up £196,000 and leapfrogging eight teams, including another of his, to move into pole position.

There is, of course, a long way to go in this year's competition, but it's worth noting that last year's winning panel, Edward Staunton's Woosnam's Wonders, had already hit the front by week 18 of the tour.

Sinnott will be hoping to emulate the doctor's success, although at this stage he has only a limited amount of control on the matter, for he has already used up two of his four transfers, with Glen Day and Phillip Price replacing Billy Mayfair and Miguel Angel Martin a little while back.