One hole-in-one is unlikely. Back-to-back aces are almost unthinkable. Then there’s this feat by golfer Jack Wiebe, which we would classify, quite simply, as impossible.
While playing a recent round with a work colleague, Wiebe tee’d off on the ninth hole, a par 4 into a blind green. Wiebe says he hit a “perfect cut” that was tracking for the green, but when they got to the putting surface, they couldn’t find his ball anywhere. Assuming it went in the hazard surrounding the green and with another group pushing them, Wiebe’s colleague decided to putt out the hole. While Wiebe continued to search, his colleague shouted, “Are you playing a Srixon 2 with a black line?”
For 99.999 percent of golfers, that would be the end of the story—an unforgettable memory to last a lifetime. For Wiebe, however, it was just the beginning. On the 11th hole, the next par 4 on the back nine, Wiebe pulled out a driving iron to lay up, but his colleague intervened. “You just made a hole-in-one on a par 4,” Wiebe recalls him saying. “You have to go for it.” So he pulled out his driver and let one fly.
When they got down to the green, Wiebe’s colleague went to look for his ball, which he hit in a nearby marsh. As a joke, he checked the hole as he passed and, much to his surprise, there was Wiebe’s ball, once again nestled in the bottom of the cup.
“We were in total shock and did not know what to do,” Wiebe explained. “This not only is the coolest thing to ever happen to me in golf, it’s potentially the only time EVER this has or will happen.”
“Ever” is big word, but we have no evidence to disprove him. From the day Golf Digest first hit the Internet, we have been covering aces of all kinds and have never seen or heard of back-to-back par-4 holes-in-one. Wiebe says he and his colleague calculated the odds, and they were 1 in 36 trillion. We’ll take him at his word, because once you get into the billions, it’s all theoretical anyway.
Wiebe is something of a hole-in-one magnet, though. He says the consecutive par-4 aces were the 15th and 16th of his playing career. Doubt him if you’d like, but the world is a dark and cynical enough these days. Call us crazy, call us marks, but we choose to believe.
