Rich Gamble started Saturday like he normally does, watering greens and getting the Hampden Country Club ready for another day of golf.
Then things took an unusual turn for the course superintendent.
Gamble and his girlfriend decided to have a family golf outing with her son and some close friends. They started on the eighth hole to avoid slowing down other golfers on a busy day.
Gamble stepped up to the tee on the roughly 245-yard par four thinking he would show the kids that he could drive it to the green. But he ended up doing more than that — He put the ball in the hole.
“I took one practice swing, and then I addressed the ball and just swung exactly how I’ve done 100 times before on that hole,” Gamble said. “It just came right down, rolled right down onto the green and just dropped right in the hole. I didn’t get a chance to see it go in. That’s why it was so unbelievable.”
The eighth hole at the Hampden course is driveable, but you can’t see the hole from the tee box. So while Gamble knew he had hit a good shot, he didn’t know quite how good until his girlfriend, Tonya Quimby, found the ball in the hole.
“I went down, walked around the green, looked for my golf ball. I was like, it should have been right at the pin,” Gamble said. “Like, it should be right near the pin. I don’t know why it’s not here.”
He started to think he had hit the ball too far, but asked Quimby to check in the hole just to make sure it wasn’t sitting in the cup. And there it was.
At first Gamble thought Quimby might be joking, or that the group of college kids playing ahead of them might have left a ball behind.
“I kind of just sat there and looked at my girlfriend and looked at her son and I was like, did this really just happen?” Gamble said. “I was beyond words.”
It wasn’t like the course superintendent had done himself any favors with the pin placement, either.
“I put the pin in the front of the green where there’s a pretty good slope,” Gamble said. “I told myself, I was like, well this is gonna be a pretty interesting part for a lot of people.”
And it was, at least for those who actually had to putt. Gamble had bogeyed the eighth hole day before with the same pin placement, but saved three strokes Saturday by not having to putt at all.
It was his second-ever official hole-in-one with witnesses, Gamble said, and the second reported hole-in-one at the Hampden Country Club this year. He heard that there may have been a third, but that golfer didn’t claim it at the clubhouse.
And as good as Gamble feels about that shot, he seems to feel even better about the work his team has put into the course.
“We’ve put a lot of money into the greens, and we’ve put a lot of work into the golf course,” Gamble said. “And we’ve got the place looking really, really good.”
