‘How is it possible?’ Father, son deliver 17 million-to-1 golf moment

Part of golf’s appeal, its magnetism, is that on any day you can tee it up and do something extraordinary. Any one swing — with the elusive combination of tempo, feel and timing — can create magic with nature as its backdrop.

Jim Rohrstaff knows the feeling. The moment. He has lived a lifetime in golf. From his days as a club professional to his current role as a partner at Legacy Partners, where he develops golf courses and communities. The Kalamazoo, Mich., native is a golf lifer.

But experience can’t prepare you for a lightning strike — when the golf gods deliver something so rare that you might be the only person on the planet to have experienced it.

Rohrstaff and his family — his wife Kara and sons Blake and Eric — are on a nine-day, six-course golf trip in Scotland, playing the hits from Nairn to Castle Stuart and Royal Dornoch. Day 4 of their journey saw them arrive at Cullen Links, an Old Tom Morris original that found its way onto the Rohrstaff’s radar courtesy of the No Laying Up podcast hosts.

“The vibe was very, very strong when we got there,” Jim Rohrstaff told GOLF.com via phone from Scotland. “It was a good day to be at Cullen. Stunning, stunning day.”

Cullen Links was originally formed in 1870, with Old Tom Morris mapping out the original nine-hole design. In 1905, “the shortest true links in the world” expanded to 18 holes. It currently plays at just over 4,600 yards and is a par 63 with 10 par threes and one par five. The Rohrstaffs saw Cullen as the perfect course to use as their entry point into the Highlands.

But even Old Tom Morris wouldn’t have anticipated the golf kismet that awaited the Rohrstaffs.

Jim started the day by driving the first green and two-putting for birdie. The family floated along the seaside edge of the Moray Coast, enjoying the quirky links test Morris derived 155 years ago.

Both Jim and 18-year-old Blake, a 4 handicap, made double bogey at the par-3 seventh. Blake’s brother, Eric, who is somewhat new to golf, hit his 6 iron to 25 feet and rolled in the long putt for birdie. Golf.

Next came the 280-yard par-4 8th, a three-story walk up to the tee box and two swings crafted by the golf gods.

“I brought driver and 3 wood,” Jim Rohrstaff said. “Blake just brought the driver. I had the tee and I said I might hit 3 wood.”

Some good-natured father-son ribbing from Blake — “that’s not enough for you” — followed, and Jim decided to hit driver.

With some helping wind off the right, Jim hit a smooth, held-off cut driver toward the green. He watched as the ball sailed over the greenside bunker on the left, landed in the rough, and took a healthy kick to the right onto the putting surface.

“I was like, ‘Oh, that’s going to be really good there,’” Jim said. “I watched it hop right and then stopped watching it.”

Next came Blake, who pegged it and told his dad he would “hit the bullet” driver.

Blake laced his tee shot. It landed on the front left part of the green, went past the hole but then started to come back.

Oddly enough, being a par-4 and their first time here, Jim and Blake didn’t think much about tracking the balls the whole way. They saw them land, then went back down the stairs to meet Kara and Eric, who teed off and then hit their approach shots. Kara missed the green while Eric landed 25 feet from the pin.

As the family arrived at the green, the search for Jim and Blake’s balls started. But there was only one ball on the putting surface, and that was Eric’s.

“I walk up, and I’m in the left rough, just above the bunker, and I look around for a second. It’s wide open. I’m like, where the heck’s my golf ball?” Jim recalled. “So I’m looking around a little bit, and because there’s only one ball on the green, and I’m like, well, where the heck am I? I thought, you know, I’m either on the green or I’m here on the left side and got stuck in the rough.”

Jim walked back to the bunker he carried and checked. No ball. Blake’s ball, which should have been on the back of the green or just off, was also not in sight.

That’s when Eric, looking for his brother’s ball, walked past the cup and made a golf discovery that will become a story in the Cullen clubhouse for years to come.

“Oh, well there are two here,” Eric said, looking in the cup.

“He’s like, there’s two balls,” Jim said while laughing. “And he wasn’t excited at all. He’s like, there’s two balls right here. And we’re like, ‘shut up.’ So of course, we go walking over there, Kara’s got her phone out, and, I mean, I started hopping around like an idiot. And we just, we just kind of went nuts. And it was just, it was, and I’m still a bit shell-shocked.”

Jim Rohrstaff and his son, Blake, had both made an ace on the 280-yard par-4 eighth at Cullen Links — a 17-million-to-one chance.

“That was my 11th hole in one,” Jim said. “That’s Blake’s first one. I’ve obviously never had one on a par 4. So, I mean, it was just the silliest, most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen, heard of or experienced on a golf course. It was nuts.”

“I didn’t really connect the dots at first,” Blake said. “I heard Dad say there was a ball in there, and I thought it was just his. And he was like, ‘No, we’re both in here.’ And I started going monkeys as well.”

The Rohrstaffs immediately took sips of their birdie tequila, a family golf staple, and then phoned the clubhouse to tell them of what had happened and inform anyone there that the whiskey was on them once they finished their round. When they arrived at the clubhouse, golf fate had one more twist for the Rohrstaffs. The bartender, Kenny, recognized the Tara Iti Golf Club logo, the Rohrstaff’s home club in New Zealand, and his daughter, Madison, had caddied for Kara several times at the club. A celebratory FaceTime with Madison followed, and then the dozen or so people in the Cullen Links clubhouse joined the double-ace party with the Rohrstaffs.

When Jim went to bed that night, long after the family party had ended, he still couldn’t believe the cosmic events of their day at Cullen.

“I tell you, I laid in bed all night running it over in my head,” Jim said. “Okay, how could that even happen? How is it possible?”

He thought about the stories of the blind par-3 at Lahinch and how caddies used to stand on the other side of the dune and put balls in the hole when they were tipped generously. But on this day at Cullen, no one helped the Rohrstaffs; it was just golf, in all its magnetic brilliance, delivering a moment that is now family lore.

“I still can’t get my head around it. It’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard of, and if I weren’t there, I wouldn’t believe it myself,” Jim said.

That’s golf.