Against all odds - hole-in-one records

Golf Digest, Jan, 1999 by Dave Kindred

Only God can make a hole-in-one. Imagine. Hitting a little ball 500 feet into a wormhole. No mortal can do that. But God is a player. He carries a driver made of frozen juices extracted from a planet yet to be discovered by man. A generous sort, He keeps us interested in His game by giving us a hole-in-one now and then. He orders up certain breezes and earth tremors to direct a wandering tee shot into a distant hole. He has a laugh when we fall in a faint.

Not that He overdoes these divine interventions. The statistics on holes-in-one are daunting. One insurance company puts a PGA Tour pro's chances at 1 in 3,756 and an amateur's at 1 in 12,750.

Yet in the late summer of 1998, against all the improbabilities, there lived outside Nashville a 15- year-old high school sophomore who said, "This year for me, well, I think if you keep hitting it at the hole, eventually they'll fall in. It's like I'm in a zone. The hole keeps looking bigger and bigger."

Then, his fresh face alight, he said, "I'd like to break the record."

The national record for holes-in-one in a year is 11, last done in 1962. The young man had a running start as described in an Associated Press story of mid-October: "Bradley Farmer is a bit of a puzzle. The 15-year- old makes a hole-in-one, yet shows no more emotion than a smile. The explanation? Been there, done that.

"Six times in 41 days.

" 'It's been pretty incredible,' says Farmer, a sophomore at Goodpasture Christian School in Madison, Tenn. 'Most people play their entire life without making one.'. . . '' We interrupt to ask . . . Six? In 41 days?

I called the Hermitage Golf Course just out- side Nashville, the site of a Farmer hole-in-one. A man in the golf shop said, "He had another one at our facility yesterday." Zounds.

The next night, I reached the Farmers' home. Bradley's father, Roger, a major character in all this, said, "He had two more today." Yikes.

It came to nine holes-in-one in 73 days. At the rate of 1 in 12,750, to get nine holes-in-one you'd play 114,750 par 3s. A round a day for 78.6 years.

But a kid did it in 73 days? This I had to see.

'I just hit it at the hole and hope' Bradley Farmer is a little guy with a touch of swagger. He's 5-foot-7, 125 pounds. He began playing at age 6, says he broke 80 by 9 and has shot 61. Out of a wide stance, he hits it 250 and straight. He's good around the greens. His Hermitage handicap is 1.0. He's a basketball guard, a baseball pitcher and second baseman. His favorite high school class is Bible. He's an only child.

At Hermitage's first par 3, I said, "Tell the truth, Bradley. Do you think 'hole-in-one' here?" He said, "I just hit it at the hole and hope."

On the four par-3 holes, playing from the front men's tees, Farmer hit two greens, neither closer to the hole than 15 feet. His other tee shots fell short.

No holes-in-one this day. But, as it happened, the subject was on at least one young man's mind. Driving to the clubhouse, I heard a sneering jibe from that teenager, a course worker who passed us en route to the cart barn.

"How many today, Bradley?" he said. "Get any?" Though Farmer didn't so much as look the fellow's way, his face betrayed cold anger. I asked how he felt.

"I ignore that stuff," he said.

"You know the guy's name?" He said, "Kevin Napier."

The name meant nothing to me. But, as it happens, critical examination of the Farmer phenomenon had begun. That morning's Nashville Ten-nessean newspaper said a high school player had denied being a witness to a Farmer hole-in-one at Hermitage. The player was Kevin Napier.

"I signed Bradley's card," Napier later told me. "But I didn't sign it as a 'witness.' I didn't join them until four holes after that."

Roger Farmer says someone has made a mistake; that neither he nor his son ever cited Napier. But The Tennessean reporter, Jim Wyatt, says, "Bradley himself told me Kevin Napier was a witness."

A 'witness' says it isn't so Sherman Tibbs is a 51-year-old construction con- sultant who also was reported as a witness to a Farmer hole-in-one.

Tibbs says it wasn't so. He'd been on Pine Creek Golf Club's 16th tee, separated from the 15th green by trees. "I didn't see him hit the ball or the ball go in the hole,'' Tibbs says. "The young man's father came around and asked would I come back to the hole, his son had just hit a hole-in-one and they wanted a witness."

He remembers the pair's demeanor. "They didn't show any sign of being enthused, excited, whatever. By their appearance, their body lan- guage, their eye language back and forth, it was more like they were questioning whether I'd be- lieve them or not."

Seeing a ball wedged between the flagstick and the hole, Tibbs spoke to Bradley Farmer. "I said, 'Your first hole-in-one, that must be a great feel- ing.' He said, 'Actually, it's my 11th.' And I said, 'Eleven! Jack Nicklaus doesn't have 11!' '' [For the record: Nicklaus has 17.]

As odd as anything else, Tibbs later found out that the hole-in-one at 15 was the second claimed by Farmer that day; the first came on No. 3. Though the odds of an amateur making two holes-in-one in a round are 9,222,500 to 1, Tibbs says, "I don't recall them mentioning another one."