Most golfers spend their entire lives waiting for a hole-in-one. They beg and curse and pray. They lean. They lurch. They crumple to their knees as opportunity after opportunity comes up short, or long, or just inches off line. But not Adele Sanford. This past weekend, the Albertan made not one but two holes-in-one during a single round at the Canmore Golf & Curling Club’s club championship… at the age of 14.
Sanford’s first ace came on the 12th hole. After that she told herself, “I don’t really care how I play, I just got a hole-in-one!” Three holes later she made another one.
“The first hole-in-one I felt was kind of lucky,” she told Global News. “Then the second hole-in-one I just proved myself and I ended up being very happy with that.”
But not everyone initially believed it… including Sanford’s own mother, a golfer herself who thought she was being pranked when she heard the news. She hadn’t had phone service much of the day when a friend told her of her daughter’s unlikely feat.
“She said, ‘There’s two,’ and I thought, Now, you don’t even know how to play golf. That’s impossible. It didn’t happen,” Kim Sanford said. “I got pretty teary when I found out it was true. I’ve been golfing since I was a kid and I’ve never hit a hole-in-one. It’s pretty amazing.”
If you’re wondering why Adele’s own mother said her daughter doesn’t even “know how to play golf”, there’s one last stinger to this story:
Sanford has been playing golf for less than a year, after picking up the game last Canadian summer. Not a bad way to start your playing career if you ask us. Not bad at all.
