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Picture this.
You’re running late to make your first tee time of the new year and can’t even schedule a practice swing.
In traditional Scottish style, the tee box is frozen, so you drop a ball onto the surface and stick the peg back into your trouser pocket.
Then, you strike a 3-wood that bounces towards its target, a mere 248 yards away… and it drops in.
Yes, you read that right. That’s the story of Gary Jordan, a three-handicap golfer from Ayrshire, who made a hole-in-one with his very first shot of the new year.
Despite being on temporary greens, the unbelievable moment arrived on the par-4 first hole of the Hillhouse Course at Kilmarnock Barassie.
And Jordan has realised he might be the only ever golfer to achieve the feat.
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“I never really thought much of it being on a temporary green,” he told bunkered.co.uk, “but when I got home, I thought, ‘that was my first shot of 2025’.
“My tee wouldn’t go into the ground, so I hit a 3-wood just hoping to find the fairway. It looked on a good line and, well, the rest is history.
“I walked up to the hole looking for my ball in the bunkers, thinking surely that hasn’t gone in.
“Then at night, I realised how unique it was, because how many people have made a hole-in-one with their first shot of the new year? Nobody has!”
Of course, Jordan, a member at Portmann Golf Club in Kilmarnock, wasn’t getting away with it lightly.
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“I was stiff as a board and I’m telling the guys to go find someone on the planet who has done that,” he said.
“Then they’re all laughing saying ‘it’s temporary greens’, but it doesn’t matter, I holed my first golf shot of the year. It was unbelievable.”
If the hole-in-one wasn’t impressive enough, Jordan says it was his third.
But the one to bring up the hat-trick will always be the most memorable, and he even stuck to golf’s most expensive tradition.
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