The Loop
Finally, some vindication for the hole-in-one-less
By Derek Evers
You know how many holes-in-one I've had? The same amount as my one-year-old nephew. None. Nada. Zero. And for a long time I was OK with this. Despite my ineptitude, I could always take solace in knowing I was only one of the millions of golfers who have yet to know the feeling of putting a "1" on the scorecard. I mean, the odds are about as good as winning the lottery, right? Apparently not.
Apparently, it's so easy a 12-year-old girl can do it TWICE IN ONE ROUND. Which is not nearly as rare as you'd think, even among teenagers. This Texas teen did it. A pair of sisters playing for the Central Oklahoma golf team both aced a hole during the same round. Even a guy from New Jersey dropped two in a day. And just when I thought I couldn't feel any worse about myself, came this story about four guys who each recorded a hole-in-one during the same tournament.
Only at a tournament as prestigious as "The Great Googly-Ball" held at the McCormick Woods Golf Club in Port Orchard, Wash. could this against-all-odds event take place. Except it didn't. And Jeff Graham, the local Kitsap Sun reporter who wrote about it, was none too pleased to find out.
As explained in the foreward that now accompanies the article, the story was a hoax. The work of a local comedian who called in the four aces as part of a 64-man scramble. Turns out the "tournament" was actually a golf outing with his friends, and the "holes-in-one" were "instances where golfers hit their tee shots with golf clubs, then rolled balls in the hole using their hands."
To his credit, Graham did his due diligence, confirming the story with all parties involved. After all, how was he to know the COMEDIAN who called it in might be playing a joke on him? Still, I do feel slightly bad for Graham, but I feel a lot better about myself today. I might not have a hole-in-one to my name, but at least I'm not a local comedian in Kitsap, Washington.
Now I can go back to thinking holes-in-one are the work of professionals like these.
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