Frank Bensel Jr. made history Friday morning when he hit a pair of aces, on back-to-back holes, in the second round of the US Senior Open.
The 56-year-old golfer from Jupiter, Fla., birdied a 173-yard hole-in-one on the fourth hole at Newport Country Club when he hit a 6-iron.
The feat was astonishing enough until he followed it up with another ace on the 202-yard fifth hole with the same club. Both holes are par 3s.
While back-to-back holes-in-one are extremely rare, it's also unusual for a course to have par-3s on two straight holes, like the 7,024-yard, par-70 Newport Country Club setup this week.
The National Hole-In-One Registry, which accesses the probability of aces in golf, calculated the odds of making two holes in one in the same round as 67 million to 1. No odds are available for consecutive aces, perhaps because it was never considered since most courses don't have back-to-back par 3s.
The only other USGA Championship to have a two-hole-in-one player card was at the 1987 U.S. Mid-Amateur, when Donald Bliss birdied the eighth and tenth holes. Starting on the back nine, Bliss birdied a hole in one on his first hole of the day and his 17th at Brook Hollow in Dallas.
The PGA Tour said on social media that Bensel's back-to-back aces are the only such feat in a Tour-sanctioned event.
Bensel has played in six PGA Tour events and has never made the cut. On Friday, he had a rough time in the field by the sea. He opened the day at 4 and had back-to-back bogeys to follow his aces.
