23 Jun 2020 | Clubs and Facilities |
Eagle boys cap day of amazing feats
by Mark Hayes
Jack Mackenzie on his incredible day at Medway...
There must have been something in the air at Victorian golf clubs at the weekend.
Two of the more incredible groupings of rare achievements had clubhouses abuzz at two separate venues – Medway in Melbourne’s west suburbs and at 13th Beach on the Bellarine Peninsula.
The first is one that’s sure to come up around the Mackenzie family dinner table for years to come – the day when all three sons, playing in separate groups, each had an eagle on the par-five 16th hole.
The oldest, Jack, 18, told Inside The Ropes today that he’d been shown up in the power department by his younger brothers on the dog-leg right hole of 469m.
“The worst thing is I that had the most club in. I hit driver (then) 2-iron, Tom hit driver (then) 3-iron and the middle (brother) Joe hit driver (then) 4-hybrid,” Jack joked.
The brothers all flushed their drives and chose to attack a pin cut on the right and it all just mystically came together with Joe’s the longest putt at just over 6m.
“It’s very rare, but it was a lot of fun,” Jack said.
“My dad was playing with Tom and my mum was also playing – so we were six under for five people in the same family in the same comp.”
Jack works in the pro shop at Medway and plays off a handicap of one, while 17-year-old Joe (handicap of eight) and 14-year-old Tom (handicap of nine), the youngest pair keen cricketers who generally play winter golf when they can.
If you think that’s impressive, you’re probably not alone.
But some might argue that at 13th Beach, the host club of the ISPS Handa Vic Open, four blokes combined for something almost as amazing.
Back-to-back on the Beach Course’s 12th hole (the 3rd for the Vic Open), Gary Anderson and Peter Matulich watched in disbelief as their tee shots trickled into the cup for aces.
Not to be outdone, Travis Mott followed suit later in the same competition, making a mockery of a genuinely tough par-3 which yielded its third hole-in-one of the day.
But as rare as all that might be, rising Victorian state squad member Toby Walker “slam-dunked” a 7-iron for an albatross two on the par-five 4th hole that many will know as the closing hole in the club’s Vic Open routing.
It’s not all around the same dinner table, admittedly. But it’s still one almighty feat.
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