I am a low 90s high 80s golfer, I maybe get 12-14 rounds of golf in during a good year. About 80% of those rounds I play with my dad, who took me to the golf course growing up. He always encouraged me to stick with it when I was young, even after I got kicked off of the “Jr. Golf Tour” we had in my area for shooting two rounds over 120.

Fast forward to today, I was beating my Dad and a friend by a fair amount at Eagle Rock Resort. This is a course in Hazelton, PA designed by Arnold Palmer. I had shot a 44 on the front and was fairly pleased for it being my first time playing there. I had a rockier start to the back 9 and my Dad was giving me a hard time, trying to throw off my mental game and had succeeded. I shot a triple on a par 5 as I duffed my second shot into a pond.

The next hole (#12) was a par 3 about 145 yards from the whites. I looked at them before the shot and said “I am going to get a hole in one here, for you guys being mean.” I grabbed a brand new Pro V1x out of my bag, gave it my 3-dot mark with a sharpie and walked up to the tee box. The wind was in our face, pin placement was about 6-10 feet off of the back left of the green. I tee’d up the ball and swung at 8 iron. The contact felt good, the ball started left and flew over some trees on the left side of the fairway and then started to come back. The ball then came down, hit the fringe on the left side and rolled left to right across the green and disappeared.

My dad and other golf partner were in disbelief and I was running around and threw my hat off. There were no asterisks and no questions, that was my hole in one. That Titleist ball will only ever be hit once. Another nice part of this hole in one, is it was on Memorial Day weekend and the pins were hung with American Flags, rather than branded for the course. God bless America, and God bless the game of golf.

(The only negative to this story, is my nerves were so high after #12 that I wasn’t able to keep up my play and ended the day with a 91)