As an excellent golfer for a long time, Frank Bensel Jr. is not unfamiliar with good shots. A longtime PGA professional, the New Yorker has hit plenty of them. He has won tournaments and helped others get better. Before Bensel, 56, teed off Friday morning in the second round of the U.S. Senior Open at Newport (R.I.) Country Club, he had made a dozen holes-in-one. Before the sun was very high in the New England sky, he had 14.
Holes-in-one occupy a unique space in golf. One competent player can play for decades and not make one; another might make multiple aces. They can go in the cup on the fly, after a bounce or two, or creep over the edge like the most gently stroked putt. Some aces have a lot more to do with luck than skill. Those 1s take hard left turns off mounds or carom off a tree trunk or skitter along after being skulled. But a pencil isn’t discerning. Nor are most memories, although a friend of mine who can veer toward the pessimistic speaks of his bladed-short iron ace at a Connecticut course as if he were re-living a crime, a fluke as felony.
Bensel’s recollections of Friday’s events will always be of delight not disgust. Not only did he have two holes-in-one in one round, he achieved them on consecutive holes with his 14-year-old son, Hagen, alongside as his caddie. “This,” Bensel said, “will be remembered obviously forever and ever.”
By afternoon Frank and Hagen were posing with red pin U.S. Senior Open pin flags, a “4” for father and a “5” for son, denoting the scenes of the surprises on one of America’s oldest courses, where the first and second USGA championships were held in 1895. The ball and 6-iron that Benzel used for both aces are destined for the USGA Museum.
This Senior Open is USGA championship No. 1,001, and Benzel is the first to make back-to-back aces. Most courses don’t have consecutive par 3s. In fact, only Don Bliss in the 1987 U.S. Mid-Amateur is known to have made two in one round in any USGA championship.
“So, the first one was great, that got me under par for the round,” Benzel said. “And then the second one, I just couldn’t believe it. To even think that could happen was amazing. Hit the ball kind of in the right place, and then it just started rolling. I was kidding around, like, ‘Now let’s go for another one,’ and it happened to go in. Everybody just couldn’t believe it. We all went nuts. It was amazing.”
The odds of two aces in one round? According to the National Hole-in-One Registry, 67 million to one.
For the record, the fourth hole was playing 173 yards, the fifth was 202 yards. Hagen, who is named for the legendary golfer of the early 20th century, wanted his dad to hit a 7-iron on the fourth, but Frank went with a soft 6-iron. The next one was same club hit a little harder and rolled in for what Benzel thinks was his fifth or sixth in competition.
“Everybody is going to want a lesson now, for sure, on a 6-iron,” said Benzel, who gives lessons at Century Country Club in Purchase, N.Y., and The Country Club at Mirasol in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
In PGA Tour history, just three golfers have made two aces in one round: Bill Whedon, 1955 Insurance City Open; Yusaka Miyazato, 2006 Reno-Tahoe Open; Brian Harman, 2015 The Barclays.
The only golfer other than Benzel known to have made consecutive aces in a tournament was Englishman John Hudson on June 11, 1971 at the Martini International, an event on the British PGA circuit at that time but later part of the European Tour. Hudson was 25 years old when he went 1-1 during the second round at Royal Norwich. His double aces started with a 4-iron from 195 yards on the 11th hole. On No. 12, a 311-yard par 4 that was playing downwind, Hudson hit a driver. His ball landed short, bounced onto the green and rolled in. “I did not see either ball go in the hole,” Hudson told reporters. Like Bensel’s aces, they happened on a Friday.
Hudson was shown in a local newspaper raising a pint, with a smile that spoke to the crazy, rare, joy he had experienced. Like no one else, Bensel knows the feeling.