With an afternoon of bright sunshine, good friends and two beautiful golf courses, it was already a great day for Jim and Trish Rogers of Woodway.
And then a great day got bizarrely better.
Jim Rogers and his wife, Trish, were both playing golf on Tuesday. They have memberships at Everett Golf and Country Club and Seattle Golf Club, and Jim was playing with friends at the former while Trish was playing with some of her friends at the latter.
As it happened, they both got holes-in-one, both on the eighth hole, and both at almost the same time. The odds defy calculation, if not outright belief.
“Two spouses on two different courses, both playing hole No. 8 on the same day at the same time, and getting holes-in-one? That’s a probability I can’t even imagine,” Jim Rogers said.
“I can’t tell you how many people asked me, ‘Would you go buy me a lottery ticket? And not tomorrow, today.’ It was amazing how many people said that,” Trish Rogers said.
Jim Rogers, a 68-year-old insurance broker, played some golf as a younger man, then got away from the game, but resumed playing seriously about 10 years ago. He has a 14 handicap and got his only other hole-in-one playing at Seattle GC in 2012.
Trish Rogers, who is 66 and a retired veterinarian, just started playing golf about a year ago. The idea, she said, “is that now when we travel, we can golf together. And it’s been wonderful.”
Because she is still a novice, Trish Rogers had no notion that she would ever get a hole-in-one. Certainly not when she teed her ball and prepared to hit an 8-iron on the 105-yard eighth hole at Seattle GC.
The ball reached the green, but the hole was not visible from the tee. When she reached the green with her playing partners, “we looked and looked for the ball, but we couldn’t find it. But then they went to pull the pin and they said, ‘It’s in here.’”
Her ace was “beginner’s luck,” Trish Rogers said. “But I was still jumping up and down.”
Meanwhile, Jim Rogers was teeing his ball on the 112-yard eighth hole at Everett G&CC at almost the exact moment. He hit a wedge with a slight fade, and because of mounding near the front of the green he also could not see his ball go in the cup. In fact, he thought his shot was short of the hole.
When the group reached the green, “we didn’t see the ball and we were saying, ‘I wonder where it is.’ One of the guys went to the hole, looked in and then, just like you’d kicked a field goal, he put his arms in the air.”
On the next hole, Jim Rogers borrowed a cell phone from one of the other men to call his wife. Because she was golfing, she had properly turned her phone off, so he left a message inviting her to dinner at Everett G&CC to celebrate the hole-in-one on No. 8. Several holes later Trish Rogers returned the call to the same phone, and it was answered by the friend.
“She asked if I was there,” Jim Rogers related. “And then she said, ‘How did he know that I got a hole-in-one?’ (The other man) said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘Well, he said he wanted to have dinner because of the hole-in-one I got on No. 8.’
“And that’s how we learned who got what, when and how,” he said with a chuckle.
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