Fate dealt Phil White a pair of aces in Saturday’s golf outing at Richmond Country Club.
White defied all-but-astronomical odds by making two holes-in-one in one 18-hole round. He aced RCC’s par-3 15th hole with a wedge from 137 yards. An hour or so later, he aced the par-3 sixth hole with a 4-iron from 182 yards.
“It’s overwhelming. That’s the only way to describe it,” he said. “I don’t know what else to say, maybe because it hasn’t really sunk in yet. It was very shocking, the kind of thing you just never expect to happen.”
When the ball tumbled into the hole at No.6, he said, “I just sort of stood there with my hand over my mouth.”
Research conducted by Golf Digest suggests the odds of a recreational player making a hole-in-one are roughly 12,000 to 1. The odds of a recreational player making two in the same round? Roughly 67 million to 1.
The aces were the third and fourth of White’s career. Each has occurred on a different par-3 hole at RCC.
“Lately, I’ve been feeling pretty good about my game,” said White, a 51-year-old software salesman and a five-time Richmond Country Club champion. “But there’s no way I saw anything like this coming. I had no clue. I was just looking forward to a long Memorial Day weekend and playing two days of golf with my friends.”
White played with Jeff Jansen, Tom Vogt and Tim Baldwin. The foursome started on the back nine because of heavy holiday traffic. The pin placement at No.15, White said, “seemed like really good yardage for a wedge.”
His shot landed 2-3 feet behind the flag, bit hard and spun backward toward the hole.
“I saw it the whole time and all four of us were talking to it the whole time,” White said. “It rolled backward, very slowly, and then it reached the hole and just seemed to sort of disappear.”
White said his strokes of fortune were rooted largely in luck. Even so, both shots were struck with authority. His tee ball at No.6, he said, seemed locked onto the target from the moment of launch. It landed a few feet short of the flag and scurried directly toward the hole.
“I turned away — I just turned my head a little bit — at the last moment,” White said. “I don’t know why, exactly. I think maybe I didn’t believe it could possibly happen again.”
He said the boisterous reaction of his playing partners “made it pretty evident what had happened.”
White shot 69, 2 under par, in Saturday’s round.
He said he now has two reasons to regard May 24 as a red-letter day. The first: His son, Tucker, turned 19 on Saturday.
A child’s birthday “is always a remarkable day in your life,” White said.
But from now on, he said, Tucker will have to share.
“Now, I guess May 24 is going to be remarkable because of golf, too.”