Arbitrating Aces: what qualifies for golf’s most hole-y moments?

My grandfather, Ron, at Touchmark’s golf course; a life-long lover of the game and three-time ace maker.

By: Shane René, Administrator of Media & Communications

My grandfather, Ron, had the spectacular fortune of making three holes-in-one in his lifetime. While I wasn’t alive to witness them, and the details of each have slipped my memory, their lore will always live with me. But on one summer day in 2016, with my arms hooked under his armpits to hold him off the ground, we both craned our necks to watch the last golf ball he ever struck stop turning on the edge of the hole.

That memory leaps to the front of my mind when the IGA opens the Hole-in-One Club for posting season each year. And the details of that near ace prompts an interesting question: what counts as a “proper” hole-in-one?

The odds of making an ace are not terribly short of being struck by lightning (roughly 12,500 to 1 vs. 15,300 to 1). For most of us, it requires many years of taunting the storm. And that’s precisely why the IGA created the Hole-in-One Club; we believe it is worth our time and resources to reach out, tip our caps, and send you some swag. But we have to maintain some standards.

For admission into the IGA Hole-in-One Club presented by X-Golf, players must make an ace on a rated hole from a rated set of tees. This is why we limit admissions to posting season, when most of Southern Idaho’s golf courses return to rated setups. But beyond that, we only ask for witnesses. When a ball clatters against the flagstick on an empty golf course, does it really make a sound?

My grandfather’s final swing occurred during a staged escape from his apartment to a six-hole loop beyond the parking lot of Touchmark senior living community. It was just about as far as he could shuffle behind his walker. The greens and tees are made of bouncy, low-grade astro turf. The flag sticks, which never move, resemble toothpicks topped with linen. None of the holes eclipse 60 yards.

In a just a few laps around, even high-handicappers have a reasonable chance of hooping their tee shot. The only thing stopping scratch players are plasticky skips along the turf. But if your buddy arrived to your Sunday tee time with news of making an ace while visiting a loved one here, would you count it? What if it they told you their walker-bound grandfather made one? Would that detail make things different?

Last year, as part of a continued effort to make the handicap system more accessible to new players, the USGA changed its length threshold for course rating to just 750 yards. This means that many par-three courses — a common football in hole-in-one litigation — are now part of the rating system. Any ace made at these tracks are, in fact, eligible for the IGA Hole-in-One Club.

Years ago, my little brother, Dylan, made a Hole-in-One on the 7th hole at Pierce Park Greens, a nine-hole pitch n’ putt that is yet to be incorporated into the rating system. He made it while playing with my father, Richard, who spoiled his fun like a Hall of Fame voter looking at Barry Bonds’s home run records.

“That one gets an asterisk,” our father insisted. “It’s just Pierce Park.”

The eye-brows raised at short-course holes-in-ones do not rise without a fair thought. On a typical 18-hole golf course, a golfer has just four (reasonable) chances at an ace. An a-typical par-70-72 layout might have five or six. Compare that to the nine consecutive chances my brother had a Pierce Park, and the calculus feels a little different. So much so that when Dylan made another ace on the 3rd hole at Shadow Valley Golf Course a few years later, he called it his first.

When we consider what counts and what doesn’t, it’s worth noting that the IGA’s standards for admission into the Hole-in-One club are designed to target our community of members. While this initiative aims to celebrate a monumental moment in anyones golf life, we are not the final arbiters of what is an what is not a “proper” hole-in-one.

Dylan has every right, if he so choses, to count that hole-in-one at Pierce Park as a perfectly proper one — even if we won’t send him a bag tag. These moments are so rare, and so full of something akin to magic, that prodding the devil in the details seems like little more than a fool’s errand.

And had my grandfather made his fourth ace that day in 2016 — falling backwards into my arms as he flicked an 8-iron through the ball one final time — it would have been as “proper” as it gets.