Unless you are on the PGA tour and play golf for a living, you will probably never experience the feeling of making a hole-in-one. Casual golfers like myself will almost certainly go their entire lives without achieving the rare feat. In fact, you will probably never even witness one unless you see it on TV like this one or this one. That’s what makes what happened at the Plantation Golf Club in Leesburg, Fla. on Tuesday so amazing.
Within a span of only five hours, four golfers somehow managed to accomplish the seemingly impossible for a casual player. Don Starkey, Ron Kosits, Maynard Thompson, and Merlyn Wilson all registered holes-in-one — seriously. Believe me, this story sounds nothing like the 15-year-old kid who keeps calling local newspapers around my hometown and telling them he got another hole-in-one. By now I know a fake hole-in-one tale when I hear one, and this seems legit.
To put the feat into perspective, the National Hole-in-One Association (I had no idea that existed either) calculated the odds of four golfers getting a hole-in-one at the same course on the same day. The results say something like that happens once every 260,000 days, or 712.33 years. In other words, humans would be lucky to still exist as a species the next time something like this happens.
