My first hole-in-one: the true story of how I once hit a golf ball 84 yards at Scholl Canyon and it went into a hole without needing an additional stroke
On Monday, I hit a hole-in-one.
This happened in the sport of golf. It also happened on April 1, 2024, aka April Fools’ Day, a holiday typically associated with pranks, fabrications and other rudimentary jokes. Not that I would ever joke about such an achievement, but the coincidence is worth mentioning. The one day I secure golf’s rarest of achievement (1 in 12,500, by some estimates), it also happens to be the one day where everyone is acting skeptical AF.
AF, indeed.
That being said, nobody questioned the authenticity of the milestone. Thank god, and thank you to all my friends for your trust and esteem. And even if I were the type to engage in pranks, fabrications and other rudimentary jokes, never in my wildest dreams would I make up a story about a hole-in-one. Shame on anyone who would suggest otherwise. The HIO (are we using acronyms now?) is sacrosanct among both golf’s amateurs and elite.
In fact, in my golfing career, including Monday, I have witnessed five such holes-in-one. They were all memorable.
One time, Matt Brown snap hooked a horrendous shot into a hillside 10 yards left of the fourth green at Weddington, and somehow it kicked right and rolled into the hole. We all went nuts.
I once saw a stranger mis-hit a ball so poorly on the eighth hole at Los Feliz it rolled all the way down the fairway and onto the green, before — through the grace of god — dropping in the cup. It was his first time playing. He then remarked to his friends: “this shit is easy, homes.”
Matt Glassman aced the par 3 at Brookside near the snack shack, coming back toward the Rose Bowl. You know the one, you have to jump the arroyo and they have those decent hot dogs on the right. Before the ball hit the green, he said, and I quote, “it’s short.” It wasn’t.
In 2023, I saw Jon Lloyd strike a ball so pure on 18 at Scholl Canyon, that although we didn’t see it drop in the hole, we had such high hopes and giddy bravado, we drove toward the hole recording video on my cell phone in selfie mode. The ball was in the hole. Our video got many likes and views on social media.
This week’s instance was the fifth I’ve seen drop, and so far, my favorite. Let’s start with the venue. The Scholl Canyon Golf & Tennis Club, is a short par 60, 18-hole track, and according to its website, “offers exceptional golf and tennis facilities at an affordable price.” That may be true, but the place is also a dump.
Of the Scholl Canyon Landfill’s permitted 400+ acres, 56 of them were used to build this executive golf course. The active dump is still plugging away off in the distance, with choice views of the wasteland visible from 12 and 13. Bulldozers can be seen lazily pushing dirt across the flattened outcrops of trash pyramids. Seagulls circle overhead. A foreman fires off a flare and the gulls scatter. Somewhere, a golfer misses a putt.
In fact, it wouldn’t be a round of golf at Scholl Canyon if someone in the group didn’t mention that one day that vast sea of trash over yonder could become another golf course.
My ace happened on the 17th hole.
It started with a brief disagreement and ended with us going nuts. One of my playing partners, “Z,” didn’t believe my GPS reading at 81 yards, so I walked over to the tees. “Now it says 84.” “See,” he said.
Z teed off and was still short. Elijah, who I assumed was Z’s son, took his shot. I didn’t see where it went.
I took my 58-degree Callaway lob wedge out of my bag from the back of the golf cart. The club is a few years old now: a JAWS MD5 C-Grind with 8 degrees of bounce and a lie of 64.5. With a stiff KBS Tour C-Taper 120 shaft and recently regripped Golf Pride MCC Plus4 in standard blue, it’s the workhorse of the bag.
I teed up my Kirkland golf ball. It included my trademark blue dot drawn with a Sharpie neatly above the logo and safely nestled inside one of the dimples. The ball’s number was one.
Despite being a dump, I play Scholl Canyon all the time. My driver is a liability, so I gravitate toward shorter courses. Also, if you face away from the trash, you can see downtown Los Angeles on a clear day.
Knowing this course well, I knew the green slopes downhill away from the peaks of trash canyon. Knowledge is power. Also, aim small, miss small, so I picked a spot three feet above the cup and let the lob wedge fly. My swing thought was “inside out.”
The ball floated high and straight. The strike had sounded crisp. The ball was on its intended path home.
I knew it was good, but, like, I didn’t know it was hole-in-one good. No one ever does, at least not really. At this point in my golf career, I had given up any hope for an ace. I just couldn’t imagine a world where I would be screaming from the 17th tee box at Scholl Canyon and then running around giving high fives to strangers with that one guy yelling, “let’s fucking go” over and over again. I don’t remember when exactly I started playing golf, but if you scroll back in my Google Photos account, as one does in the digital age, golf pics start showing up around 2010. That sounds about right, and although I’ve witnessed a few drop, I honestly never thought an ace would happen for me. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, and certainly not someone who would give high fives to strangers while running around a tee box.
My closest attempt up to this point was a ball that stopped two inches from the cup on eight at Los Feliz. That near-achievement was on Saturday, June 5, 2010, at least according to a tightly cropped photo in my Google Photos account.
That was 5,049 days prior.
Between that close call and the real deal, I had changed jobs a few times, moved apartments at least twice, and had even gotten married. I got a passport, saw some stuff, and more recently, I even signed up for a Los Angeles Public Library card. Books: check ’em out.
One thing about golf, and I think everyone can agree, is the game is really dumb. Grown men and women pay lots of money and spend lots of time trying to make a small ball go in a small hole that’s moderately far away, and also, we’re only allowed to use sticks. I don’t think my insight on the absurdity of the game (“…but seriously, folks, what’s the deal with golf?”) is anything particularly insightful or funny. If you want that, I recommend Tim Conway’s “Dorf on Golf” and/or Leslie Nielsen’s “Bad Golf Made Easier.”
But what most non-golfers don’t understand is that if you can get past that absurdity — if you can somehow accept the frustration, the time commitment and all the other downsides, of which there are many — the game has a lifetime of joy to offer you. Some moments are small: the simple bliss of pureeing a 5 iron. Some are large: finally driving that green and making that eagle putt. Some are magical: Brown’s wayward shot bouncing off that hill for a once-in-a-lifetime ace. Some are humbling: a shank just as you think you’ve got it all figured out. And some are long lasting: all the friendships we made along the way.
The best part is that no matter what else is going on in my life — whether things were going great, or it was an absolute shitshow — I had golf.
I think back to the early days of the pandemic. After “15 days to slow the spread” turned into “45 days to slow the spread,” which then became something about “flattening the curve” and eventually just our new normal, I had fallen into a deep depression. In between soul-sucking Zoom calls for work and washing my groceries, I had become hollowed out. Mallory and I were bouncing off the walls in isolation and as the whole world shut down, I became smaller and smaller, until at last, I didn’t think there was anything left of me.
Time stood still and the days became chores.
And then they reopened the golf courses.
Yeah, I was wearing a KN95 mask with an extra balaclava on top, popped collar and low-hanging hat like an absolute psycho, and yeah, I was using hand sanitizer between holes and avoiding every other human on the course, but golf was back, baby. I was small and unrecognizable, yet golf, somehow, was able to fix that. Through the miracle of making birdies, flushing irons, clearing that trap and unconscious putting, golf gave me myself back.
I needed a win back then — we all did, amiright? — but let’s not just limit great moments in Olsen’s golf history to the novel coronavirus and other such rough patches of our lives. Golf absolutely slaps in our best moments, as well. Its gifts are aplenty.
Back in 2012, I was on a heater at a craps table in Las Vegas. This was an hours-long session in the middle of the night at the Luxor. As the well in front of me started to fill up with red and green chips, and eventually black chips, players at our table started getting nicknames. We had “Colorado” and when he left and a new guy, also from Colorado, showed up, he was dubbed “Colorado No. 2.” We had “Blue Shirt” and “Hot Hands” — or maybe it was “Manos Caliente,” our beloved and often-used Spanish twist? I actually can’t remember. The older I get, the more the craps stories blend together.
In all fairness though, who can truly remember everyone from the craps tables of our lives?
What I do remember is telling everyone in the casino, repeatedly, “that’s just money having fun.” I also had a real obsession with talking about “fat stacks.” “Breaking Bad” was currently one of the most popular shows on television, I was a huge fan, and I just couldn’t resist doing my best Jesse Pinkman impression, calling out “fat stacks, yo” as I pulled up my winnings.
The real secret to my success though was my good luck charm standing right behind me: my friend Scott Perlmuter. It was touch and go until he arrived. Having been en route to our hotel room, he decided to swing by the table and see how things were going. With him now on board, touch and go quickly turned into fat stacks.
Call it superstition or just Scott’s zeal for watching me make money, he refused to play and instead focused on being the luckiest of lucky charms. With each big win, I would throw my arm around Scott and announce to the rest of the table that Scott and I were in this dice game together, and no matter what happened, come tomorrow morning, with clear minds and our fat stacks in tow, we would be off to Las Vegas Golf and Tennis to buy new putters, my treat. As the well grew with chips, so did our aspirations for new putters. Up $500, I boasted of new Odyssey White Hot putters for each of us. We would never miss another putt. Not once. Never again, I shouted to “Blue Shirt.”
Once the winnings surpassed $1,000, all bets were off. “We’re getting Scotty Camerons, you sonsofbitches,” I bellowed, alternating my hand between a cigarette and warm Miller Lite.
My favorite player at the table was this guy named “The Silent Assassin.” He didn’t say shit, and he was very good at rolling hard eights, a lucrative skill rarely seen in Las Vegas and certainly even rarer at 4 a.m. inside the Luxor. When he held the dice, he held the dice. The guy made me a lot of money, and for that, I would soon name my new putter after him.
Eventually, Scott and I waved the white flag, and I cashed out for $1,600, not lifechanging money, but for me and my putter ambitions, I might as well have just scored a LIV Golf signing bonus.
At some point between leaving the Luxor in a cab with Scott, watching the sun rise, and falling asleep in a lounge chair in our room at the Cosmo, I called Las Vegas Golf and Tennis. They were closed. I got their voicemail.
We can only speculate about the absolute shitshow of a voicemail I left them. If I had to guess, it was both vaguely menacing and somehow harmless, and certainly centered around me buying every single putter they had on the sales floor. I made it drunkenly clear that Scott and I would be by shortly to buy up all their best stock, and I’m definitely certain I mentioned my “fat stacks, yo” multiple times. Whichever employee opened the store that day and had the displeasure of sifting through the hot mess of voicemails knew one absolute truth: earlier that morning, at the Luxor Hotel & Casino, money was just having fun.
While I’ll never truly know the substance of my voicemail message, when I finally awoke on that lounge chair, confused as to why I would choose to sleep there instead of a bed, I had a missed call and a voicemail of my own.
“Hello, Mr. Ebright, this is Dennis with Las Vegas Golf and Tennis. I can assure you we have a fine selection of excellent putters available for sale. We’re open seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. most days, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays. We look forward to meeting all your golf needs. Thank you.”
Later that day, I would walk from the Cosmopolitan to the golf store, a brisk mile or so over Interstate 15. I left with an Odyssey Metal-X #1 putter. It had a loft of 3 degrees and a lie of 70. I named it “The Silent Assassin.”
Scott, despite my best pleas, refused to let me buy him a putter. An absolute mensch to the very end.
But, Olsen, what do hot dice, cool winnings and belligerent voicemails really have to do with golf? First of all, nobody ever hit a point in craps and bellowed out, “We’re making an extra payment toward the principal on our student loans, you sonsofbitches.” Responsible financial decisions and dice winnings do not mix — everyone knows that — and no offense to the tennis half of Las Vegas Golf and Tennis, but if I ever declare we’re all getting new Yonexes after I hit this hard eight, I would encourage casino security to promptly escort me off property and add my face to its list of banned idiots.
New skis? No. New baseball bats? Get out of here. We’re getting new kayaks. No, we are not.
Golf, man.
That’s what it’s all about.
I constantly find myself making practice swings during idle moments of my day, I measure distances with my stock yardages, and I always know what time the sun sets. I’ve asked golf balls in motion to “check,” “sit,” “get legs,” “be good,” and one time, I even told one to “hit a house,” which in hindsight is kind of a dumb thing to say. I once played nine holes of golf in the morning at Los Feliz and then drove 300 miles to play a “back nine” the same day at Santa Teresa in San Jose, racing daylight the whole way. I’ve lost a million golf balls in this town, and I’ve gone through more sunscreen than humanly possible. I’ve woken up too early to drive too far for good tee times, and one time, I even ran around a tee box screaming my absolute head off while giving high fives to strangers.
It happened on Monday.
My Kirkland ball with my trademark blue dot had floated down from the heavens. It gently landed just three feet above the cup.
And then it rolled in.
