Any Chance He'd Share a Lottery Ticket with Me?

Shackelford links to this account by San Antonio golf writer Tim Price of an amazing stretch of golf for 76-year old Bob Hullender.  Hullender is an excellent player, the oldest man to win the Texas State Amateur.

Here's the sequence:

On Friday, Jan. 3, he aced No. 16 at the La Loma Course at Fort Sam Houston with a 7-iron from 158 yards; Monday, Jan. 6, he put down the second ace at Brackenridge Park on the 138-yard 10th with a 9-iron.

 Obviously those are very respectable distances for a man of his age, but as the TV pitchman in me says, but wait, there's more:

Mike Arnold, who teamed with Hullender to win the Texas State Four-Ball Super Senior Division Championship last year, witnessed both. The day after the second ace, Tuesday, Jan. 7, he was playing in a group in front of Hullender at Olmos Basin Golf Course and had just finished his round on the par-5 18th that was playing close to 500 yards. Soon, word made it to the clubhouse that Hullender produced another remarkable shot. He’d double-eagled from 215 yards using a 3-iron loft hydrid (sic).

 OK, that's just freaky, but what's he done lately?

I'm tempted to quote Tom Lehrer, who famously quipped:

It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.

I have two stories to add, though neither tops this.  On a personal note, I had my first hole-in-one in early November, on a day I was playing with Theresa and Maggot & wife (she'd kill me if I wrote anything that came close to referring to her as Mrs. Maggot).  Right after pulling my Lethal from the cup, Theresa holed her bunker shot for a birdie.  So we were three under gross as a family on the hole, 4 under net.  

I had turned away and didn't see her shot, and mistakenly thought that it was the Bride of Maggot's the lovely Jo Ganz's shot (is that permitted lexicon?), and this was just after he had told me that he thought she got a shot on the hole.  For a brief moment I thought that my first ace would do no more than halve the hole.  Would have been better story that way, no?

The second story involves John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach who died a few years ago at age 99.  Wooden was an avid golfer, and apparently quite the good stick. 

It turns out that he is one of only five people known to have made both a hole-in-one and an albatross in the same round, which he did at the Erskine Park Golf Course in South Bend, IN in 1939.

After his death the family found the scorecard amongst his papers, which he always maintained that he had saved.

Nan Muehlhausen, Wooden's daughter, holds up the 1939 scorecard attesting to Dad's amazing feat.

What I love most about the story is Wooden's self-effacing response to his four over par 75 for the day:

“I shot a 77 (sic) that day,” he said. “You go five under on two holes and a 77 doesn’t look all that good.”