Feature Story
What Golf Has To Offer
Though golfers enjoy competing against other golfers and against the courses they play, in the long term they actually play against themselves: how they feel or play on any given day, how they have played in the past on the same course game after game, how they handle their clubs, and so on. So, when golfers still love the game, the process of playing, the challenges, and even the frustrations after decades of playing, that fondness for the sport must surely run deep.
So it is for one of Myrtle Beach Seaside Resorts’ guests Mr. Ron Estok who made his first hole in one on Friday, October 9th, after forty years of playing golf. Playing with a friend, he chose an early morning tee time to play Indigo Creek Golf Club. On a typically fall day, he went through the first nine holes without much fanfare, but just as soon as he hit his drive on the 154-yard, par-3 11th hole, a surge of euphoria welled up in him as he watched the ball sail out towards the flag stick of the green, closer and closer and then plunk on the green, rolling, rolling, and then in the hole. With a blink of initial disbelief, he looked at his friend and announced what they both now knew — a hole in one!
In achieving holes in one, the pundits say that luck plays a large role when and if they occur, and sometimes the difference of achieving such an honor or not is marked in fractions of centimeters. The bottom of the cup is the ultimate judgment. The birds in the trees only sing out in chorus if the golfer’s little ball is hit just once and then falls into that snug little interior spot on the green!
Most players of all calibers play a lifetime without ever achieving a hole in one, and some PGA Tour professionals have yet to sink their first one but have achieved the much coveted double eagle score. In fact, USHoleInOne.com, the leading insurer AGAINST holes in one at tournaments has calculated that the odds of achieving that one-shot on any given par-3 course within a year’s time are 12,500 to 1 for an amateur (7,500 to 1 for a professional). Other sources cite the numbers as 1 in 3,756 for a professional golfer to hit an ace and 1 in 12,750 for an amateur (equivalent to playing a round a day for 78.6 years). Hitting a hole-in-one shot on a designated hole, not just any hole, is 1 in 20,000, and the odds of a single player hitting 2 holes in one in the same round of golf jump to 1 in 67 million, rising to 1 in 2 trillion for the highly unlikely 3 holes in one in a game. Many holes in one are never recorded, only celebrated in the “19th hole” festivities, but the more closely scrutinized PGA Tour pros are known to hit approximately 30+ in a year’s worth of playing PGA Tour challenges, and LPGA players just over 20 in a year.
The record for numbers of holes in one by a single person in a year of playing is 11. “I just hit at the hole and hope,” said 15-year-old Bradley Farmer, a Tennessee high school sophomore who in 1998 managed 9 holes in one in 73 days. Just hoping seems to summarize the game plan for most of us lower achieving duffers for every hole in every game, but sometimes the proverbial lightning strikes, as it did with Mr. Estok’s hole in one at Indigo Creek! Well done to you and everone in the select club of hole-in-one achievers!
