Lightning strikes twice for Conyers golfer

By Larry Hartstein

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

For a good amateur golfer, the odds of making a hole-in-one in any given round are 5000 to 1, according to Golf Digest.

Now, what are the odds of acing the same hole two straight days?

Susie Wetherington would like to know. The Conyers woman pulled off that shocking feat last Thursday and Friday at The Oaks Course in Covington. Different playing partners witnessed each ace;  course officials are submitting documentation to the United States Golf Association.

"I'm on a USGA committee, been in the business 43 years and it's the strangest thing I've ever heard of," said Dick Schulz, Oaks director of golf.

Wetherington, 52, used the same Ping G10 hybrid and Titleist ball both days on the par-3 11th. It measured 130 yards on Thursday, 135 on Friday due to pin placement.

"On Thursday I didn't hit the ball as high as I wanted to and it bumped up on the fringe and looked like it was stopping (before the hole)," said Wetherington, a divorced mother of two who lives in Conyers and joined the semi-private Oaks course less than a year ago. "I looked away and when I looked back, I saw it fall in. That was crazy.

"The next day I actually hit a really good shot that bounced up on the green and it just kept rolling and rolled right in there.  I went ‘Oh my God!' and everyone started screaming."

Georgia Tech probability expert Michael Lacey, using the Golf Digest estimate, put the odds of Wetherington making back-to-back aces on the same hole at 400 million to 1.

But the math professor noted Wetherington had a lot of things in her favor.

"There are plenty of advantages if you've just done it," Lacey said. "You can remember how you placed the ball, remember your swing,  set your feet in the same stance. There's a lot of muscle memory you can take advantage of to make the circumstances as close to the time before as you can get them. Once you hit the ball, everything else is physics."

Still, he called it "a striking piece of luck."

In contrast, the odds of winning Mega Millions are "only" 175 million to 1.

Wetherington, who goes by "Susie Q," learned how to play golf when she dated a junior golf pro in high school.

"He made me go to the driving range with him, made me hit balls for a year, and wouldn't let me play on a course for a year," she recalled. "He took me to a par-3 course on my 18th birthday and I played the course in par."

She's currently an 8-handicap, but has been as low as a 5.

In a great year, players at The Oaks Course might make a total of four or five holes-in-one, head golf pro Andy Bowman said.

Pro shop worker Gary Wingerter joked with Wetherington before she teed off Friday.

"He said I should just come back and write down a ‘1′ for the 11th hole," she said. "He was laughing and saying, ‘Well, you figured out that hole.' Sure enough when I came back, I was like, ‘Gary, you called it.'"