A couple of years ago, when I was invited to the R&A World Golf Museum in St Andrews to speak to some senior locals about the golf they used to play, I threw in a question as to whether any of them had had a hole-in-one.
Five of them had and five faces lit up. Though their memories of everyday matters might not have been the best, they talked as clearly of their holes-in-one as if they had had them that very afternoon.
A week or so ago, when I was at Warwickshire Golf’s 125th anniversary luncheon at the West Midlands Golf Club, I asked that same question of the 136 guests. I chose Elizabeth Earnshaw, the first British woman to be invited to referee at the Masters, to make an educated guess as to how many hands went up. And when she gave her answer as 70 percent, no-one was inclined to disagree.
People will never tire of wanting to know how he or she did it, before talking of the day they had theirs.
At the same time, fingers galore were pointing to a lady by name of Ann Bache, a member of my old club, Edgbaston. In 2012, when she was 50 years of age and a 21-handicapper, she was playing in a Ping four-ball competition and, armed with her own set of Ping clubs, she had two aces in her first nine holes. The odds against such a thing happening were apparently 67 million to one. (Intriguingly, England’s Dale Whitnell, who won the DP World Tour’s 2023 Scandinavian Mixed, repeated Bache’s effort when he had a couple of aces in the second round of this year’s Investec South African Open.)
Several of the women at the West Midlands club were at sixes and sevens concerning how many aces they had mustered. However, Alison Nicholas, a former Women’s British and U.S. Women’s Open champion, and Marsha Button, the pride of Nuneaton Golf Club for 57 years and still a member of the club's first team, had definitely had seven apiece.
The lunch over, I asked Nicholas if she could remember her septet. After an initial shake of the head, she asked me to hang on a moment. And, given that moment, she was able to run through the lot, but the stroke she has thought about the most happened in a BMW-sponsored event of long ago. Everyone cheered as her perfectly struck shot disappeared into the hole before it committed the dastardly crime of popping up on the hole’s far side and sticking fast to the back rim. Had it dropped, she would have driven off in a BMW.
In 2001, Earnshaw, who had been in charge of the show of hands, had a hole-in-one on her birthday and, two days later, she was at Buckingham Palace to receive an OBE – Officer of the Order of the British Empire. (Not for the ace, incidentally, but for services to golf.)
I rang Gary Wolstenholme, the 1991 and 2003 Amateur champion and a veritable expert on holes-in-one – he, like his late father, Guy, has had as many as 22 – to ask what he thought of the 70 percent figure at West Midlands. His reply was a tad deflating. “I’m not surprised,” he said, before changing that to a more acceptable: “I’m not hugely surprised.” He had decided that most of the women who attended such a function were probably pretty good club and county golfers, and that they would be that much more likely to make the odd ace.
This, though, was the point at which we agreed that one of the joys of golf was that anyone, good golfer or bad, could have one.
We were also agreed that everyone, like those seniors at St Andrews, could do with having one in the bag to be able to savour in or his or her old age. People will never tire of wanting to know how he or she did it, before talking of the day they had theirs.
(Myself, I’ve never had one.)
Lewine Mair
E-MAIL LEWINE
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