Ones to remember
“AfklIK KEATING Royal Troon may not be the most majestic, beauteous or even most wind-racked and demanding of Scotland's resplendent links courses on golfs Open rota. But it sure can provide the most fun with its classic par-3 8th hole, known as the Postage Stamp. Place your bets for holes in one at the Championship this weekend. Most legendary hole-in-one at Troon, of course, remains the 71-yearold US veteran Gene Sarazen's in the Open of 1973. It is still as vivid in the memory as last Wednesday week. Sarazen was a plus-foured roly-poly Mr Punch who, in his pomp, won all the majors. In 1973 he was back at Troon precisely 50 years after he first played an Open there — in 1923, aged 22, when he had arrived as the game's tigerish boy wonder, but his shots had been savagely tossed about by the gales and his scores of 75 and 85 had ignominiously failed to make the cut. A half-century later beaming little Gene punched his 5-iron
into softer breezes, which scarcely stirred the Postage Stamp flag. It pitched just short, caressed the green and sweetly rolled in — to general, genial and global jubilation. Next day, in the second round at the famed hole. Gene bunkered his tee shot — then spooned out of the sand and holed for an astonishing two Cue more rapturous roof-raising. (The following week a Canadian flew to Prestwick, hired a cab, a caddie and 500 balls, hit each one off the Postage Stamp tee, failed to hole any in one, cursed, grinned and caught the same plane back home that evening.)
Holes in one might be treasured in folklore, but they are common enough. More club golfers have potted a one-shot parabola, I fancy, than club cricketers have scored a century. The magazine Golf Digest logged 35,757 holes in one in a single year in the US — that's 90 a day. Before golf gave me up, even I managed two aces in the hole — preening details on another day — at sublime Lahinch in County Clare and, when it was Southern Rhodesia, on that darling dinky course which twines around (does it still?) the fabled ruins of antiquity at Zimbabwe. In the 1950s one of my first jobs on the Stroud News was to interview a Brims
combe bloke who'd holed in one on the par-3 7th at Cotswold Hills; and in my first stab at investigative journalism I revealed that his wild tee slice had ricocheted off a tree, a drainpipe and a bunker rake before plopping to perfection into the hole.
The US pro Hal Bonner holed in one 57 times and said, 'Each one's pretty much like the other.' The top Brit ace, with 30, remains Charles Chevalier, pro at Heaton Moor in Cheshire, where my late, good father-in-law was captain. Only last week, also in Cheshire, the football knight Bobby Charlton holed in one at Formby Hall — and lost his amateur status, because the prize for doing so was a gleaming new Mercedes.
When the Texan true-great Jimmy Demaret swopped the course for the radio mike in 1957, his buddy and rival Lew Worsham was on the par-3 tee in the Chicago world championship. Pronounced Jimmy in one of the first commentaries ever (alas for him) tape-recorded for posterity, `No chance in this wind . . . He's hit it fat, for a start ... Oh, dear, it's well short ... It's clipped the top of the green . . It's rollin' but hasn't any legs left .. . It can't possibly reach the cup ... Well, I'll be goddammed, the SOB's sunk it.'
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