Todd Metzger said he scored a pair of aces on the 12th hole during consecutive nine-hole rounds at CrossRoads Golf Course on Saturday morning in his hometown of Carrington, N.D.
Unfortunately, and ironically considering his profession, no one saw the Fargo optometrist's first hole-in-one. He was playing alone.
"I have no proof that anybody witnessed the first one other than the fact that ... I made a call on the cell phone shortly after to my wife," which could be corroborated by phone records, the 36-year-old Metzger said.
"I'm not going to call my wife up to impress her because she's not that impressed by me anyway."
She should be.
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Metzger, a 7.0 handicap who plays at Oxbow (N.D.) Country Club and also has a membership at CrossRoads, beat 67 million to 1 odds by recording the pair of holes-in-one, according to the National Golf Foundation. It was his first career ace.
A 15-year-old from Fort Worth, Texas, also canned two holes-in-one in a single 18-hole round last month and landed on CBS' The Early Show.
Metzger didn't want to appear on television and he wasn't sure if others would believe his tale, so he didn't want to tell the media until his story began circling in cyberspace. Friends subsequently goaded him into going public.
Metzger actually played four nine-hole rounds by himself Saturday on the 18-hole course while on a trip with his daughter to see his parents. He planned to play all 18, but, because No. 1 was busy, chose to play the back nine for his second and third loops.
After the first ace at the 177-yard, straight-as-a-string, 12th hole, Metzger looked around for a witness but saw he was the only one on the back nine. After the second hole in one, he asked a teenager playing on an adjacent hole to run to the green and pluck the ball from the cup.
The shots, struck roughly an hour apart, were remarkably similar, landing on the fringe, springing to the right and trickling into the cup on the front, right corner of the green.
"I can still see them both plain as day," Metzger said.
However, because no one else can, he was officially credited for only one ace, the third in CrossRoads' brief history, greens keeper Don Heinitz said. Club policy states a witness is required to substantiate a hole-in-one.
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Then again, Metzger saw the rare feat and he still can't believe it.
"It was just one of those freak things," he said. "The odds of it happening are almost nil and it happened to be on the same hole about one hour apart from each other."
Readers can reach Forum reporter Terry Vandrovec at (701) 241-5548
