One of golf’s most agonizing and endearing qualities is the way it can break your heart one moment and steal it the next, with absolutely no warning.
Which brings us to Andy Chung, a fifth-grade teacher at Kamehameha Schools, and son Jordan, an easy-going 9-year-old who weighs 62 pounds and works with Les Uyehara and John Hearn.
Saturday at West Loch Golf Course, while Andy was waiting on the hillside to hit his second shot to the par-5 ninth, buddy Craig Bernard brought up Louis Oosthuizen’s double-eagle from 253 yards out at The Masters. Andy was about that far out, waiting only because Bernard told him to while the wind was blowing hard.
When the green cleared, Andy blasted his 3-wood and watched the ball land 30 yards in front of the green before he lost it in the glare.
“I went, ‘Wait a minute, that’s the middle of the green,’ ” Bernard recalled. “Andy comes down to the middle of the fairway and goes, ‘Do you think the ball stayed on the green?’ I said, ‘I think it went in the hole.’ That’s where it started getting incredible.”
Jordan, playing from the front tees, had 170 yards to the green. He also hit his 3-wood flush and had a 15-foot putt for eagle.
As they walked to the green, Bernard asked Jordan to see if his dad’s golf ball was in the hole.
“He looked down in the hole,” Bernard recalled, “looked up at us and grinned and nodded.”
Then Jordan did something even more remarkable. He drained his eagle putt. The Chungs were a combined 5-under par on one hole, with the eagle landing after a double-eagle — the rarest shot in golf.
“It was surreal,” Andy wrote on his Facebook page. “None of us got excited. It was as though something unnatural happened on that hole. Craig, finally, told Jordan that he will remember this day because he thinks it could be the only time in golf history that a father and son team was 5 under for one hole. He also said he was glad he saw it because if I told him what happened, he would never have believed it.”
What are the odds? So outrageous no one will probably ever know.
Oosthuizen’s double eagle was only the fourth in Masters history, and the first at No. 2. Dean Knuth, inventor of the USGA’s slope rating system and handicaps — and one of the game’s greatest geeks — once told Golf World the odds of a recreational golfer making double eagle were one in a million.
To put that in perspective, the odds of an “average” golfer making a hole-in-one are 13,000-to-1. About 40,000 aces a year are recorded in the United States, compared to about 200 double eagles.
Multiply the game’s rarest feat by a son’s eagle and the odds are over the moon.
So is Andy Chung, still. He shot 78 on Saturday and Jordan shot 84. Bernard beat them both with a 75.
“But my 75 means nothing,” Bernard quickly added. “It’s non-existent. … I don’t want to go back and play that course again because whatever Andy gets on that hole will be a letdown.”
One day Jordan will sense just how special Saturday was. For now, he is tough to impress. He has two eagles already. His dad still does not have one. To him, that is memorable. To his dad …
“What I cherish most is that one of my best friends was with me and my son was with me,” Andy said. “We kept the balls and I’m thinking we’ll keep the scorecard so he can remember. He will realize later.
“The best I’d ever done before was three birdies in a row and I thought that was great, thought it was the best I’d ever do in my life. I’d never got eagle in my life. If I had been putting for eagle I’d have been really nervous, so I’m really glad I didn’t have to putt.”
The moment might have been “surreal,” but Chung’s wife, clearly a nongolfer, brought him back to reality in a heartbeat.
“I got home and told her,” he recalled. “She said ‘So? Too bad that’s not something you can make money on.’ “
