ACE FIGURES SHOW SURREY LAGS SOME WAY BEHIND YORKSHIRE …
Are you male? Aged between 46 and 65? Is your handicap 13? Yes? Ideal – but you’d still stand a better chance of scoring a hole-in-one if you lived in Yorkshire …
That’s according to the data compiled in 2014 by the BOSS Watches H1Club and HowDidiDo, Europe’s largest golfing community.
Between April and November 2014, the BOSS Watches H1Club presented no fewer than 2,295 limited-edition timepieces to members at 1,063 different golf clubs in the UK and Ireland as a reward for scoring a hole-in-one during a qualifying club competition.
But just 31 of them came in Surrey, a figure which placed the county 21st in the ‘league table’ of aces scored. Yorkshire was the county which witnessed the most holes-in-one with 187, but Scotland provided the most successful clubs: both Alyth and Murrayshall had 10 BOSS watch winners. Surrey has some way to go in 2015 if it is to rival even Hampshire & IOW, which was fifth with 62, or sixth-placed Kent (51).
The vast majority of aces recorded, 89 per cent, went to male golfers, with more than half (51 per cent) aged between 46 and 65. Another 21 per cent of the watch winners were aged 66 or above, with the oldest, Stanley Thompson, checking in – and holing out – at 84! At the other end of the scale, 10-year-old Philip Brown, was the youngest, while another 60 youngsters aged 16 or below also claimed golf’s Holy Grail.
The average handicap for golfers scoring an ace was 13 and the average distance of the hole was 157 yards. Among those aces was what is believed to be the longest on record in the UK, a whopping 408-yard effort by Littlestone GC member Peter Vickerman, on the club’s 11th hole. But Vickerman was not alone in nailing an albatross – in total, 28 golfers recorded their holes-in-one on par-four holes.
Since its launch in 2013, the BOSS Watches H1Club has gifted more than 4,700 watches – at a value of more than £1m – to golfers who have recorded a hole-in-one in a qualifying club competition. And the total distance hit for those aces is roughly the same, as the crow flies, from the starter’s hut at St Andrews Old Course, to the French port of Dunkirk, or to the furthermost tip of west Ireland!
No extra registration is required to participate in the BOSS Watches promotion as all official club competitions are recorded on the HowDidiDo system, so holes-in-one are noted and automatically ratified by the golfer’s club.
Come on Surrey! Surely we can do better in 2015?
www.bosswatches.co.uk | www.H1Club.co.uk