David Mullin took the TEG 3 Green Jacket at +72 gross, twelve clear of Stuart Neumann, over four rounds played on the same Howard Swan parkland at Boavista in the Algarve in October 2010.

The tone was set in the opening round. Mullin's +17 gross was, at that point, the best gross round anyone had recorded in TEG competition. By the third round he had bettered it himself. That 85 gross, +14, was a new Boavista course record, taking four strokes off the 89 that had stood across twenty-five previous visits to the course. It was also a personal course best, since the 89 in question was his own, set in TEG 2. He has now beaten himself and everybody else with a single card. In net terms the round came in at −4, the third-best round in TEG history to date. Neumann answered on the same day with +18 gross, but the gap was already too wide to be addressed by good manners.

It was not a flawless trip. In the second round Mullin ran up a 9 at the 17th, a quintuple bogey and his worst return on a par 4. In the final round he took 7 at the par-three 11th. Neither cost him anything material. With a twelve-shot margin over Neumann, the Jacket had been decided long before the errors were entitled to an opinion.

Henry Meller's TEG 3 contained both the worst hole yet recorded and one of the best rounds. At Boavista's 17th in round one he took 12 on a par four, eight over, the heaviest single-hole loss to par in TEG history to that point and the worst of his own career. It dropped him to the bottom of the TEG 3 Wooden Spoon race, a position he had been loitering near in any case.

The next day he shot 18 over gross for a net score of two under par. That is 89 strokes, the second-best round and second-best gross round in TEG history to date. It was also his best score at Boavista, two shots better than the 91 he had managed on his previous visit in TEG 2, on a course he was playing for the fifth time. For one afternoon he was the finest golfer in the field, and he had the decency not to mention it.

Round three undid it, methodically and without hurry. A triple bogey at the 1st. A 10 at the par-five 3rd. A quadruple bogey at the 6th. That sent him back to last in the Spoon race, the bleeding stopped only by a birdie at the 11th; he was far stronger on the front nine than the back. Round four brought another quadruple bogey, at the 7th, before three straight gross pars from the 12th, by which point the arithmetic had long since stopped listening.

He finished 16 over net, and collected the Wooden Spoon. He had, at various moments, the best round of the tournament and the worst hole in the history of the thing. Only one of them came with a prize.

The 17th at Boavista Golf & Spa Resort is a par 4 carrying stroke index 17, which makes it the second-easiest hole on Howard Swan's parkland layout in Lagos. Across the four rounds of TEG 3, played there from 5 to 8 October 2010, it collected three of the trip's worst individual scores. It has no reputation whatsoever. It has, on the evidence, a body count.

Henry Meller went first. In round one he took 12 shots at the hole, eight over par and, after handicap, seven over net. It is the worst score relative to par that Meller has recorded, and the worst any player has recorded against par in TEG history.

David Mullin followed in round two with a 9, a quintuple bogey and five over par, also the heaviest single-hole loss of his own career. Stuart Neumann completed the set in round four, running up a 10 for a sextuple bogey, six over par, likewise a personal worst. Three men, three careers, three new low points, all filed at the same undistinguished address.

The oddity is that none of the three found Boavista difficult overall. All had played the course three times before this trip, and all three set new course bests during it: Mullin an 85 in round three, Meller an 89 in round two, Neumann an 89 in round three. Each improved on his previous best there, Mullin by four strokes, Neumann by three, Meller by two. The 17th simply took its own toll, quietly, as it always had.

Gregg Williams spent four days at Boavista swinging between the two extremes of his game, apparently at random. Round one ended in collapse: triple bogeys at the 15th, 16th and 17th, then a quadruple-bogey 8 at the last. Thirteen shots gone in four holes, and not a single net par among them.

Round two produced the same shape, relocated to the middle of the card. A triple at the 8th, a double at the 9th, a quadruple-bogey 8 at the 10th and a triple at the 11th. Twelve shots dropped across another four-hole stretch without a net par, undoing at a stroke the run at the 3rd, 4th and 5th that had put him four net shots to the good. He has a gift for building things and a matching gift for standing near them afterwards.

Round three began just as badly, with a quadruple-bogey 7 at the par-3 2nd, which dropped him to the bottom of the TEG 3 Wooden Spoon race. What followed was the best golf of his life. Williams signed for 97, four under net par: his best gross round at Boavista on his sixth visit to the course, five strokes better than his 102 there in Round 2 and well inside the 105 he had managed at TEG 2. It stands as the third-best round in TEG history to date, and nobody who watched round one saw it coming.

Round four returned to type, with quadruple bogeys at the 3rd, the 7th and the 12th.