The Rarest Shot in Golf

The Rarest Shot in Golf Every golfer remembers their first. Not their first round, not their first birdie, not even their first eagle — those are wonderful things, but they fade the way all accumulating memories eventually fade into the general archive of a life spent on the course. The hole-in-one does not fade. The hole-in-one is filed in a different drawer entirely, in the specific cabinet reserved for things that happened to you once and will never stop being true. You remember the hole. You remember the club. You remember the exact way the ball sounded when it left the face and the moment you knew — not hoped, knew — that it had a chance. You remember who you were with and what they said and the specific quality of the silence that preceded the eruption. You buy the drinks. You tell the story. For the rest of your life, whenever the game gets hard and the shots stop cooperating and the round is going sideways in all the ways rounds go sideways, you have this: it happened once. And that is enough.

The hole-in-one is the rarest shot in golf. For an amateur golfer, the odds of making one are approximately 12,500 to 1. For a touring professional with years of elite ball-striking behind them, better equipment, and the specific competitive focus that tournament play produces, the odds improve to somewhere around 2,500 to 1. Not great. Not something to plan for. The kind of number that reminds you, every time you stand on a par-3 tee and feel that brief, irrational surge of possibility, that the universe controls a significant portion of what happens next.

And yet some golfers have made them not once, not twice, but with a frequency that suggests either the most extraordinary luck in sport or the specific intersection of skill and alignment that produces, over a long enough career, something that begins to look less like fortune and more like fate.

The Leaderboard Nobody Talks About The PGA Tour began officially tracking holes-in-one in 1983, and since then 653 different players have made a combined 1,263 aces in stroke-play events. The leaderboard at the top of that list tells a story that the highlights reel usually misses — because the names at the very top are not the names you would necessarily expect.

Hal Sutton and Robert Allenby share the official PGA Tour record with 10 holes-in-one each, a mark verified by Guinness World Records. Sutton, the 1983 PGA Championship winner, made his first ace at the 1985 Bing Crosby National Pro-Am and his tenth at the 2003 Bank of America Colonial — eighteen years of consistency between the first and the last, which is itself a kind of record. Allenby, the Australian who accumulated 22 professional wins worldwide, matched Sutton at the 2016 CareerBuilder Challenge, completing a run of 10 aces spread across 15 years on Tour. One of Allenby's most memorable came at TPC Blue Monster in 2010, where he stepped onto the 13th tee facing 232 yards to the flag and sent a 5-wood directly into the hole. Two eagles on the previous two days. A hole-in-one on the third. Some weeks the golf gods choose a favorite.

Just behind the leaders, Hubert Green and Gil Morgan sit at 8 apiece. A group of six players — including names less famous than their totals suggest — have made 7. Stuart Cink and Jim Furyk are among the half-dozen with 6. And then there is Phil Mickelson with 5 on Tour, Tiger Woods with 2 on Tour, and Rory McIlroy with just 1 on the official books.

These numbers, taken on their own, produce one of golf's great misleading statistics. Because the PGA Tour only counts official stroke-play tournament rounds. It does not count pro-ams. It does not count practice rounds. It does not count the friendly Tuesday morning game at your home course that you have been playing every Tuesday morning for 30 years. And when you open the books to include everything, the leaderboard looks very different.

Tiger Woods has 20 holes-in-one across his career — his first at age six, his most recent in 2018 at Heartwell Golf Course in California, a number that puts him in elite company in the broader accounting of the game. Jack Nicklaus, whose official Tour record is 3, has 20 holes-in-one across all settings. Arnold Palmer had 19 across all play. Gary Player had 19. Phil Mickelson, whose 5 official Tour aces represent only a fraction of his career total, reportedly claims 47 holes-in-one across all rounds of golf he has ever played. Golf Digest published a piece on this claim and offered a verdict: we believe him. The implication that Phil's ace count might eventually threaten the all-time records is not entirely absurd, and it is entirely Phil.

The all-time record by any professional golfer across all rounds, all settings, and all levels of competition is held by Mancil Davis — the Texas pro known as the King of Aces — with 51 career holes-in-one. Davis had 20 by his 20th birthday. His first came in 1967. His 51st came in 2007 at a celebrity golf tournament, 40 years after the first, which means that for four decades straight, Mancil Davis was periodically putting a ball in the hole on a par-3 and walking to the green to retrieve something that belonged in a trophy case. He has made a hole-in-one with every club in the bag except a putter, a sand wedge, and a pitching wedge. He aced all four par-3s on one course. He has made five holes-in-one on the same hole at Odessa Country Club in Texas. The King of Aces did not earn the title through modesty.

Tiger at the Coliseum On January 25, 1997, Tiger Woods was 21 years old and had three PGA Tour wins to his name. He was paired with Omar Uresti in the third round of the Phoenix Open and stood ten strokes off the lead with approximately no chance of contending. He was 12 shots off the lead. It was a Saturday afternoon and the 16th hole at TPC Scottsdale — a 152-yard par-3 that even then was developing a reputation as the loudest hole in golf — was packed with thousands of spectators who had been building toward this moment all afternoon.

Uresti hit first and put his ball two and a half feet behind the hole. The crowd went up. Then Tiger reached for his 9-iron. The ball made one bounce and went in.

What followed was unlike anything a golf course had produced before and arguably anything it has produced since. Beer cans, cups, programs — anything that could be thrown — rained down from the stands onto the tee box like confetti at a championship parade. Tiger raised the roof, the 1990s dance move deployed at the 1990s moment that could not have been scripted better if Hollywood had tried. The noise rattled the clubhouse windows 600 to 700 yards away. People who were not at the 16th hole on that Saturday in Phoenix felt the crowd from two holes over and understood immediately what it meant. Tony Finau, reflecting on the shot decades later, called it the greatest hole-in-one in the history of the game. Max Homa said: "That's the coolest thing you could possibly do as a golfer, and Tiger did it."

The irony of the leaderboard is that this shot — the most famous hole-in-one in the history of professional golf, the ace that changed TPC Scottsdale's 16th hole from a rowdy par-3 into a permanent institution — was only Tiger's second career ace on Tour. And he would never make another one in official competition. Fifteen majors, 82 Tour wins, the most decorated career in the history of the sport, and two official Tour aces. The hole-in-one does not negotiate with reputation. It does not reward greatness with frequency. Even the greatest golfer who ever lived stood on roughly the same footing, statistically speaking, as the journeyman who played 15 years without a win and happened to catch a par-3 on a good afternoon.

That is the democracy of the ace. And it is one of the game's most honest statements about itself.

Phil's 47 There is no way to verify 47 holes-in-one. There is no database that cross-references Phil Mickelson's lifetime of golf against every par-3 he has ever played in every setting from Tour events to pro-ams to Saturday morning games at Rancho Santa Fe. The number cannot be audited. The record cannot be confirmed. Phil said it and Golf Digest believed him, which is a reasonable position to take regarding a man who has been playing elite golf since childhood and who clearly possesses both the obsessive dedication and the specific short-iron precision that produce holes-in-one at a higher rate than most.

The 47 is almost beside the point. What it tells you is that Phil Mickelson has been playing this game with such intensity, such frequency, and such sustained commitment to attacking the flag that the shots that go all the way in have accumulated at a rate that surprises even the people paying closest attention. Phil has never been a player who aims for the safe part of the green and hopes for the best. He has always aimed at the flag, committed fully to the line he has chosen, and accepted the consequences of that decision as the price of being the kind of golfer he wants to be. Some of those shots miss by five feet and leave a difficult putt. And some of them — 47 times, apparently, give or take — keep going.

Golf Digest also mentioned, in the same piece, that Ben Hogan once had a dream that he made 17 straight holes-in-one and lipped out on the 18th. There is no stat line in golf more perfect than that one. Not even a dream could give Hogan what he wanted on the 18th.

Shane Lowry and the Holy Trinity And then there is Shane Lowry, who has done something that no professional golfer in the history of the game had done before him and may not do again.

Three holes-in-one. On three of the most iconic par-3s ever built. In three of the most prestigious professional events on the calendar. Across nine years.

The 16th at Augusta National during the final round of the 2016 Masters — an 8-iron from 181 yards on a Sunday afternoon at the most hallowed venue in American golf, on a hole famous for the slope that feeds the ball toward the flag and the roar that goes up when it arrives. The 17th island green at TPC Sawgrass during the 2022 Players Championship — the most intimidating par-3 in American golf, surrounded entirely by water, where the psychological challenge of the shot often overwhelms its modest yardage. And the 7th hole at Pebble Beach Golf Links during the 2025 AT&T Pro-Am — a 54-degree wedge from 113 yards above the Pacific Ocean, a shot that landed 25 feet short, took a firm bounce, and released into the cup while Lowry sent his hands skyward.

Golf statistician Justin Ray confirmed it: Lowry is the first player in the history of professional golf to hole-in-one all three of those specific holes in official competition. The Holy Trinity of golf's most iconic par-3s, completed over the span of a career by a man from County Offaly, Ireland, who says it is luck of the Irish or something and grins like a man who knows that luck and something are not always the same thing.

He is already telling people the 12th at Augusta is the next one on his list. The par-3 over Rae's Creek at Amen Corner, the hole where championships are decided and where the wind swirls in ways that decades of accumulated caddy wisdom cannot fully predict. The 12th has been aced only three times in Masters history. The last time was 1988. If you have been paying any attention to Shane Lowry's relationship with iconic par-3s, you would not rule it out.

Honorable Mentions: When the Ace Changed Everything Jonathan Byrd, 2010 Shriners Hospitals for Children Open — The Shot That Won in Darkness

It was the fourth hole of a sudden-death playoff at TPC Summerlin. Jonathan Byrd, Martin Laird, and Cameron Percy had been playing past sundown and the light was failing. Byrd stood on the 17th tee — a 204-yard par-3 — reached for a 6-iron, and hit a shot he could barely see. The ball found the bottom of the cup. In near-complete darkness, at the end of a sudden-death playoff against two other professional golfers, Jonathan Byrd made a hole-in-one to win a PGA Tour event. He is the only player in Tour history to win a sudden-death playoff with an ace. The 6-iron and the ball he used are in the World Golf Hall of Fame. So is the cap he wore. "What a feeling," Byrd said afterward, still processing what had happened. "It was a shock to my system, pretty much."

Andrew Magee, 2001 Phoenix Open — The Shot That Should Not Exist

The par-4 17th at TPC Scottsdale plays 332 yards. Andrew Magee, standing on the tee in the first round of the 2001 Phoenix Open, hit a driver. The ball carried roughly 300 yards, took a massive hop forward toward the green, hit Tom Byrum's putter as Byrum stood over a putt on the green, and deflected into the hole. It is the only known hole-in-one on a par-4 in the history of the PGA Tour. It happened partly by accident, partly by the specific chaos that the Phoenix Open produces, and partly because 332 yards with a driver and a fortuitous ricochet off a competitor's putter is apparently something the universe occasionally permits. Nobody had seen it before. Nobody has seen it since. The rulebook, blessedly, had something to say about it: it counts.

Si Woo Kim, 2025 PGA Championship — The Longest Ace in Major History

The 6th hole at Quail Hollow plays 252 yards. Si Woo Kim stood on the tee in the second round of the 2025 PGA Championship, selected a 5-wood, and hit what would become the longest hole-in-one in major championship history. The ball took two bounces and rolled into the cup. The ace, struck from a distance where most Tour professionals are simply trying to find the green, moved Kim up the leaderboard and into the permanent record books simultaneously. Fifty-one holes-in-one have been made at the PGA Championship since it became a stroke-play event in 1958. Not one of them traveled 252 yards before going in. Until Kim.

The Ones That Matter Most None of these shots — not Tiger at the 16th, not Byrd in the darkness, not Lowry completing the Trinity, not Magee's impossible par-4 ace — are more vivid to the golfer who cares about them than the ones they witnessed themselves. Not on television. Not on a highlight reel. In person, on a real course, with real people, in the specific unrepeatable light of a day that was going to be ordinary until it wasn't.

Here are two that belong in any honest conversation about what a hole-in-one actually means.

The first belongs to Ryan Burgess. On the morning of his birthday, Ryan rolled up to Briar Bay Executive Course in Miami, Florida — enthusiastically running late, operating on something less than a full night's sleep, in the specific physical condition that birthdays sometimes produce. He stepped onto the first tee. He set up over the ball. And he hit what can only be described as a Shaquille O'Neal style laser of an iron shot — a ball struck with such authority and such pure intent that the viewer was immediately presented with exactly two possible outcomes: either the ball had cleared the green by 20 yards and was lost somewhere in the beyond, or it had gone directly into the cup. There was no middle ground. The ball simply disappeared once it reached the green, the way only two kinds of golf shots disappear — the ones that go too far and the ones that go exactly far enough.

Happy birthday, Ryan Burgess. You stepped up on the first hole on your birthday, hungover, running late, with no warm-up and no ceremony, and made a hole-in-one. You are in an elite club, forever. The witness is on record.

The second story requires a small introduction. There is a woman named Sandy — a grandmother, a wife, a woman who approached most things in life with the specific confidence of someone who had never been given a reason to doubt herself. Sandy was not a golfer. She tried it twice with her friends and found it wanting. She gave it a third attempt on a day out with her husband — a man who had loved the game for over 40 years, who had coached his daughters' softball teams, who had spent decades as a judge and practicing attorney for whom the truth was not just professional obligation but personal identity. A man who was also, in every meaningful sense, a hero.

On the par-3 7th hole at Granada Golf Course in Coral Gables, Miami, Sandy made a hole-in-one.

Her husband had been playing for over 40 years. Never made one. The writer of this article has been playing for 35 years. Still waiting. Combined, that is 75 years of genuine, devoted love for this game, spread across two people who would have given anything for the shot Sandy made on her third outing. The golf gods, it turns out, do not consult the seniority list.

After that day, Sandy put down her clubs and never picked them up again. Not because the game had disappointed her. Because she had mastered it. She made a hole-in-one on the 7th hole at Granada Golf Course on her third time ever playing golf, and she walked off that green understanding something that 75 combined years of experience had not produced for the two people who loved the game most in her life. She was done. The mission was complete.

Anyone else would call that impossible. Sandy would not have understood the objection. Impossible was not a word she spent much time with. She loved and she lived like anything was possible — and on one afternoon in Coral Gables, on a par-3 that had no idea what was coming, she proved it.

As for her husband — the former judge, the man whose entire life was organized around the principle that truth was not negotiable, who would not compromise his integrity for anyone or anything — he developed, when asked about Sandy's hole-in-one, a very specific and very convenient memory condition. The question would come. The room would wait. And the man who had presided over a courtroom for decades would pause, consider carefully, and offer the most honest dishonest answer ever given by a member of the bar: "I didn't see anything."

In all fairness to his integrity — he might have sneezed at the exact moment the ball dropped into the cup. He cannot be certain. The defense rests.

That is the hole-in-one. That is what it actually is, underneath the odds calculations and the Tour records and the leaderboards and the Mancil Davis ace counts and the Tiger moments and the Phil claims and the Shane Lowry Holy Trinity. It is Sandy on a Tuesday afternoon in Coral Gables, putting down her clubs forever because she did the thing and she knew it and she needed nothing more from the game after that.

It is Ryan Burgess, hungover on his birthday, striping one into the darkness of a cup nobody could see from the tee.

It is your grandfather, a man of unimpeachable truth, suddenly unable to confirm or deny what his own eyes may or may not have witnessed.

It is the game, doing what the game has always done — arriving without warning, refusing to follow the script, and leaving behind a story that never stops being told.

Every golfer who has ever made one is a member of the same quiet club. No dues. No meetings. No formal acknowledgment beyond the drink you owed the bar and the story you have told ten thousand times since.

She did the impossible, because she loved and she lived like anything was possible.

Rest in peace, Sandy. The 7th hole at Granada will always belong to you.

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