Do You Believe Her?

Upfront, I told Jackie Gagne that I was skeptical.

"I know it's hard to believe," Gagne wrote in an e-mail. "But when people meet me and meet the people that have witnessed the Hole in ones . . . they seem to turn in to believers. The best person was Peter Kostis he is now a believer!"

Sure enough, Kostis said to me the same stuff he'd said on the air. "But, Peter," I said, "in 11 years on tour, Tiger has three."

Apples and oranges, the analyst insisted. The PGA Tour's par 3s are hairy-chested monsters, not the cupcakes that women play.

To put Tiger and Jackie on a relatively level playing field, I asked tour statisticians for numbers on Tiger from 100 to 165 yards this year. Their ShotLink system measures every player's every shot -- not in every event, but in enough to be meaningful.

This year Tiger had 318 shots in the 100- to 165-yard range. Guess how many he holed out. Exactly.

ShotLink even provided Tiger's numbers from that distance for the last five years.

He is 0 for 1,844.

Jackie Gagne is a rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed blonde, 5-feet-5 and 155 pounds. Her website's "About Jackie" section identifies her as a softball/basketball/runner/rock climber/ex-jock from Rhode Island.

"My father would call me his little 'sports star,' " she wrote. "My father would practice with me in a schoolyard for hours helping me with my pitching for softball."

The thumbnail bio adds personal touches about "cooking for my friends" and "relaxing with my cats." She paints herself as a "very private person" who finds "this entire media frenzy" disconcerting.

At the start of the hole-in-one run, few members at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif., knew her well because she was new, over from Indian Ridge Country Club, eager to make friends, if not sure how to do it.

One old-time member saw Gagne as "fun and goofy, outgoing, really supportive of your golf." On first meeting her, the member says she couldn't shake loose. "She was just clingy, ya'know?"

Money was a given. Gagne shared a big Rancho Mirage house with her longtime friend and playing partner, psychotherapist Barbara Kreedman. She drove a little Mercedes. In celebration of her holes-in-one, she threw champagne parties at the club. She used the good times as reproofs to skeptics, saying, in essence, no one would cheat knowing it would cost thousands in Dom Pérignon. Besides, she said, there was the deal where club members kick in $5 for every hole-in-one.

"I would have to pay off a ton of people if it was a lie," she wrote to me, "and then if I was not telling the truth I would be arrested for stealing."

The Palm Springs newspaper, The Desert Sun, said in its monthly magazine that she had been vice president of operations for Microsoft in Boston. (But Microsoft says no record confirms her employment.) After moving to the desert, Gagne told friends, she had built a computer company, sold it for a lot of money, retired and took up golf. (Other sources say it was a small company, operated briefly, and then closed.)

The Desert Sun golf writer and columnist Larry Bohannan first heard of Gagne late in January 2007. This very private person -- the website description -- e-mailed the newspaper saying she'd made two holes-in-one in five days.

"That was nothing that throws up a red flag," Bohannan says. There are 126 courses in the Palm Springs area. Holes-in-one happen.

Another e-mail in February reported her third hole-in-one. "Then in March," Bohannan says, "she told me she'd made her fourth, and I say, 'I gotta go talk to this woman.' "

But other work got in the way. So she was up to six, and Bohannan still hadn't seen her when he asked, "Can we meet Friday?"

Before they met, she had seven.

"I go talk to her, and she doesn't seem to understand what she's done. She's confused that people are going crazy over this. I write it; it runs on the front page."

At which point, she stepped on it.

"If seven holes-in-one in 65 rounds can be thought of as 'slow,' " Bohannan says, "that week things happened quickly. She got numbers eight, nine, 10 and 11."

There's even an unofficial Gagne hole-in-one on videotape -- so says Brian Kiley, a cameraman for KESQ in Palm Desert.

Near the end of May, shooting a feature, he took Gagne and her friend Linda Hogg to the eighth hole at Mission Hills' Dinah Shore course, 155 yards to an elevated green. On Gagne's third swing, Kiley is heard saying, "Oh, that's got a chance." Gagne shouts, "It's in the cup!" She took four more swings for Kiley, then the threesome rode together to the green. There, Kiley says, "Linda said, 'We better check the cup in case it really did go in.' So we walk up to the cup -- and there's the ball."

That day's newscast carried the video -- now shown on YouTube -- but the ball is seen only briefly as it leaves the tee. The next day, Kiley says, KESQ ran a slowed-down, zoomed-in, highly pixillated version that shows Gagne's shot taking a bounce and dropping into the hole. Of the 16 holes-in-one, Bohannan said he believed the nine at Mission Hills were real. The other seven, he wouldn't vouch for them. So I began my reporting with her first hole-in-one on the road. Her eighth of the year, it came in a member-guest event at La Quinta's Mountain View Country Club.

"She shot two under par that day," club pro Dan Brand says, "and she asked for the scorecard."

A souvenir of the hole- in-one? "There was no 1 on the card."

He learned about it in a newspaper story.

"Gagne's been telling this cockamamie story about how one of our members came to her in the parking lot after the round. She says the lady insisted that Gagne had made a hole-in-one at the 17th. The lady supposedly saw a maintenance worker take Gagne's ball out of the hole before she got to the green and toss it off to the side."

Brand was steamed then. "It wasn't on her card, she didn't sign for it, and I don't believe it." He is steamed now. "I don't think she understands the history of the game, the honor, all those things."