What Are The Rarest Golfing Feats That Are Actually Achievable For Amateurs?

Is there anybody who's quite as naively optimistic and hopeful as a golfer? We all turn up to play with the thought that today could be our day. We take on ridiculous shots when the chances of executing them successfully are low because we genuinely believe we can achieve it, whatever cold logic might say.

Even high-handicappers dream of a moment or a day when everything goes right for them. Maybe just that one shot which even Tiger Woods in his pomp would have been proud of executing.

After all, some golfing feats don't require sustained excellence, they just require a rare moment of brilliance.

Hole-in-one

Just one stroke of brilliance is required here, allied perhaps to a bit of luck.

A friend of mine took his daughter golfing. She had never played golf before, they played nine holes together and she got a hole-in-one on one of them.

To the best of my knowledge, she has never played golf again. Whereas some people who have golfed regularly for decades have never had a hole in one.

Colin Montgomerie won 31 times on the European Tour and secured eight Order of Merit titles, yet reportedly never recorded a hole-in-one in professional tournament play throughout his career. Nor has Brooks Koepka, winner of five Majors.

Yet Andrew Magee made one on the 332-yard 17th hole at TPC Scottsdale in the 2001 Phoenix Open. This shot certainly needed some luck – the group ahead were still on the green and his ball hit the putter of Tom Byrum, who was crouching to line up his own putt and ricocheted into the cup eight feet away.

Roughly 1-2% of golfers get an ace annually and 60% of them are recorded by players aged 50 and older.

Eagle

The hole-in-one is two achievements in one – not only the ace, but also an eagle. Now, that is value for money.

An eagle on a par 4 takes a bit more skill in theory as it requires two shots. But par 4s can be as short as 240 yards; sometimes play even shorter due to the specifics of the course design, such as doglegs, or the set up of pin and tee placements.

So long as you get a halfway decent drive off, then it is a question of holing the second shot, which, on some of the shorter par 4s, will be of a much shorter distance than most par-3 tee shots.

With the longer par 4s, the hole is out of range with the second shot to all but the biggest hitters, but most par 5s tend to be in range for the majority of club golfers with three well-struck shots.

In the pro game, a par 5 is looked upon as a prime birdie chance. Stats say that, on a par 5, pros make eagle 1 in 23 times, whereas on a par 4 it is about one in a thousand.

For the average golfer the odds of an eagle are a reported 1 in 250 on par 5 and 1 in 6,000 on par 4. It has been calculated that just under an eighth of amateur golfers will make an eagle during their lifetime.

Hitting every green

Okay, let’s make it simpler. Rather than holing the approach shot for an eagle, what about just plonking it on the green each time?

Par on each hole presumes two putts, so deduct two from the par of a hole and you get the score you need to be on the green in to make a green In regulation.

Well perhaps we better forget this one. I have just asked my helpful AI assistant the odds of doing this throughout a round and it has come back with the chances of a low single figure handicapper doing so is 1 in 262,000. Mind you, these are good odds compared with those for a 15-20 handicapper, which it says is 1 in 3.8 billion.

Hitting every fairway

So far we have been concentrating on feats which require some distance to the shot. But what about the shorter hitter, such as the senior golfer?

The average tour pro finds the fairway only about three times in five. In 2024, the most accurate player on the PGA Tour, Aaron Rai, averaged 73.26% of fairways hit.

Presuming 60% accuracy off the tee, the chances of hitting 14 fairways in a round (presuming four pars 3s on the layout) is 1 in 1,283.

But tour pros hit the ball a heck of a long way. It’s easier to be accurate when you hit it less far. So maybe hitting all the fairways in a round is the one to aim for here?

The figure given for a high handicapper is 1 in 37 million rounds. But this presumes they only make the fairway on average 40% of the time.

I reckon some high handicap senior golfers would exceed this 40% figure easily, those who are the short-but-steady players off the tee. Hit three-quarters of the fairways on average, and it’s a 1 in 56 probability of doing so on all 14 fairways.

Let’s tweak the odds a tad in our favour, and head to a course with six par 3s, the type Seve Ballesteros liked to design. Then we have, for a golfer who finds the fairway just half of the time, a figure of once every 4,096 rounds mathematically; 60% of the time and it’s 1 in 460 rounds.

But if you are playing such a course and you find the fairway on average three-quarters of the time during a season – not an unrealistic figure for the steady-but-short-hitting senior golfer – then the mathematicians will tell you the odds become 1 in every 32 rounds.