‘I don’t have a magic ball.’ How a Myrtle Beach woman made two holes-in-one in one round
When her tee shot Tuesday afternoon on the 120-yard 16th hole at the Members Club at Grande Dunes was in the air and in line with the flagstick, Eileen Johnson begged for the ball to miss the hole.
It was an unusual reaction, but it had already been an inconceivable round of golf.
Johnson had already made two holes-in-one during her round, and a third ace would have been perhaps unprecedented in the history of the game.
“The ball was tracking right for the flag, I swear, and I said, ‘Please don’t. This will be too much,’ “ said Johnson as she watched the ball come up just short of the green in a front bunker. “I’m glad it went in the bunker, kind of. The story is unbelievable. If I didn’t have the witnesses then who would believe you?”
Johnson said she now has five aces at the Members Club since moving to Myrtle Beach eight years ago from Vermont and becoming a member. The last came in October.
She plays about three times a week, has taken one golf lesson several years ago and carries a handicap index of 20 that has been as low as 17. The two aces helped her shoot a 15-over-par 86 Tuesday.
“I truly think that hole-in-ones are luck,” Johnson said. “Come on, everybody hits the green it’s just luck where the ball is going to go. I really don’t know. I’m not a lucky person so maybe this is just where I get my luck. I was hoping to win the lottery. I don’t have a magic ball, I’m telling you that.
“I’m not that great of a golfer so it could happen to anybody. It’s unbelievable.”
She was playing with her husband, Tom, and friends Tony and Debra Shealy, who had never seen a hole-in-one made in person.
“They couldn’t play the rest of the round. They were awful. They were very excited to see it,” said Johnson, who owns the Johnson Energy home heating fuel oil business in Vermont with her husband. “. . . To be the recipient of one, you just can’t believe it. And the people that are with you are more excited than you are, kind of, because you’re still processing it.”
The first one Tuesday came on the 98-yard fourth hole with a pitching wedge.
“We couldn’t see it. The sun was in our eyes. So we get up there and I can’t find my ball and [Tony Shealy] said, ‘Well you know it was going towards the hole,’ so I said, ‘I’ll go look,’ and there it was,” Johnson recalled.
Johnson made a triple-bogey 6 on the next par-3 before arriving at the 13th hole, which measured 124 yards to a back pin. She hit an 8-iron “to the middle of the green and it kept tracking, and I said, ‘Just get it up close,’ you know, and bang, we saw that one go in,” Johnson said. “Then after that we could all not concentrate at all. It’s crazy. This is still unbelievable, I’m still pinching myself, believe me.”
Tradition calls for the person who makes a hole-in-one to buy a round of drinks for their playing partners, so she’s about to run up a bar tab on Sunday when the couples traditionally play a round then have cocktails afterward.
By then she may owe another drink.
The odds of an amateur making a hole-in-one are approximately 12,500 to 1, according to the National Hole In One Registry, and of making two in the same round is approximately 67 million to 1.
Johnson’s accomplishment is the second hole-in-one phenomenon to occur on the Grand Strand in the past year.
Last October, 71-year old Jim Fuddy of Pennsylvania, who had never made a hole-in-one prior to his golf trip to Myrtle Beach with a group of friends, made a hole-in-one in consecutive rounds on consecutive days on Oct. 27-28 at Long Bay Club and the King’s North Course at Myrtle Beach National.
This story was originally published September 29, 2021 at 4:18 PM.
