Frank Bensel Jr. may have just accomplished golf’s rarest feat.
USGA/Kathryn Riley
Move over, albatross. Professional golf may have a new rarest feat.
According to the National Hole-in-One registry, any golfer’s chance to make a hole-in-one is about 12,000 to one. That number drops to 5,000 to one when we’re talking about a low-handicap player or club pro like Frank Bensel Jr., who’s playing in the U.S. Senior Open this week.
But the odds of what Bensel just did at Newport Country Club Friday morning are a heck of a lot longer than that.
After opening his first U.S. Senior Open with a 75 Thursday, Bensel, a former pro at Winged Foot who now splits time between Purchase, New York’s Century Country Club and the Country Club of Mirasol in West Palm Beach, Florida, started his second round with two pars and a bogey before coming to the first of Newport Country Club’s back-to-back par-3s at the 4th and the 5th.
Bensel played both holes in just two strokes.
That’s right. He made back-to-back aces.
The National Hole-In-One Registry lists odds of making two holes-in-one during the same round at 67 million to one. This has been done three times on the PGA Tour, most recently by Brian Harman in 2015. But making aces on back-to-back holes? While it’s probably happened in recreational golf, it’s probably never happened in a professional tournament before, let alone a major championship.
It did occur last year, before a major championship when Seamus Power dunked back-to-back aces on the 8th and 9th holes of the Augusta National Par-3 course during the annual Masters par-3 contest. That has also been done three times at the event.
A manager at the National Hole-In-One Registry confirmed they had received registrations for back-to-back aces, but never before in tournament play. They estimated the odds of achieving back-to-back holes-in-one in tournament play at “well over a million to one.” That seems like a safe assumption.
The registry does not list the odds for making back-to-back aces. Likewise, it’s most likely to happen on back-to-back par-3s (although it could also happen at a course like TPC Scottsdale which has a short par-3 (16) followed by a drivable par-4 (17)), which is a rarity on most golf courses, with the exception of Cypress Point Club in California, Newport, and several notable courses in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
However, none of these courses regularly host major professional championships. This is Newport’s first major event since the 2006 U.S. Women’s Open while Cypress has been out of the rotation for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am since 1990.
Bensel is playing in his first senior major this week, but he’s no stranger to big-time competition. The 56-year-old who plays out of Jupiter, Florida, has played in four majors, including the 2007 U.S. Open at Oakmont and three PGA Championships, all coming within three different decades.
The only video of the aces came from the USGA Twitter account, which posted the video of Bensel plucking his ball out of the hole on the wind-swept 5th green at Newport Country Club. Winds were in the 6-12 mph range with gusts up to 18 mph Friday morning, making Bensel’s feat all the more impressive.
The conditions and pure adrenaline of the moment clearly got to him after 5 as he bogeyed his next four holes to turn in a one-over 36 in his second round. That’s five bogeys, two aces and just two pars.
