A crowd of 100 golfers, friends and families surrounding the No. 6 green erupted when Jeff Beto’s ball rolled into the hole for a hole-in-one during the 56th Rockford Country Club member-guest tournament.
“I haven’t done that much high-fiving, chest bumping and hugging on a golf course in my life,” Beto said after his 141-yard pitching wedge spun five feet backward into the hole. “Everyone saw it go in. Everyone went nuts. Clubs flew in the air. Making one with your buddies is cool, but this was a ruckus.”
Five minutes later, with the crowd still parked around the 6th green in their carts, Dana Epperson slam dunked his shot, like Michael Block memorably did in the PGA Championship a few weeks ago, only to have it seemingly bounce out and land about three feet away from the hole.
“If you had taken your ball, that would have stayed in,” Epperson yelled to Beto.
It wasn’t until the golfers reached the green when they realized what really happened. Epperson’s yellow ball was in the hole, and Beto’s was on the green. Epperson’s ball shot Beto’s out.
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“I was expecting to mark a ball on the green,” Epperson said. “When I went to mark it, I got so confused. This is not right. It took me a good 30 seconds to get my head around what actually happened.”
Beto was confused, too.
“There’s this minute of total deflation,” Beto said. “I asked Ryan, ‘My ball is not in the hole. What happened here?'”
Then Beto remembered – if an opponent’s ball hits your ball, you can replace it where it was – which was in the hole. And since Epperson’s ball was still in the hole, both counted as holes-in-one.
A second hole-in-one knocking the first out of the hole is not something the golfers or RCC head pro Ryan Niffenegger had ever heard of before. They aren’t even sure how it happened.
“It had to be some amount of spin and a lot of force to knock that ball out,” Niffenegger said.
“Mine must have caught the edge of Jeff’s ball, like a pool shot,” Epperson said.
The odds, according to Golf Digest, are 12,500-to-1 for an amateur to get a hole-in-one and 17 million to 1 for two amateurs to ace the same hole. But this wasn’t a foursome; 20 players were on the tee after the first cut of the 48-man member-guest two-man best-ball scramble. But that still means around 3 million to one just to get two holes-in-one. And astronomical to have the second one knock the first out of the hole.
“Incredible,” said Erik Matuszewski, the editorial director of the National Golf Foundation. “Never heard anything like it.”
Neither of those was the first hole-in-one of the day. Beto’s partner, Colin Hurka, had a hole-in-one on No. 13 an hour earlier.
“The odds of all three of them have to be billions and billions to 1,” Beto said.
Epperson was playing in the showdown portion of the tournament — which starts with the top 10 teams and is whittled down to two teams after three holes before one hole to decide the title — for the first time in his five tries in the tourney.
“I don’t know if I will ever make another championship flight,” Epperson, a 10-handicap, said, “but I will always have a story to tell.”
Contact: [email protected], @matttrowbridge or 815-987-1383. Matt Trowbridge has covered sports for the Rockford Register Star for over 30 years, after previous stints in North Dakota, Delaware, Vermont and Iowa City.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Rockford’s rare hole-in-one story: Second ball knocks first one out