It’s the rarest of shots in golf. An albatross, or double eagle, occurs so infrequently that experts peg the chances of it happening at 6 million to 1.
To do it twice in the same round? One trillion to 1, but by all accounts such an accomplishment has never happened in the history of the game.
Until last week.
Cameron Starr, a 26-year-old mini-tour player from Florida, pulled off the feat Friday at TPC Summerlin. He made a hole-in-one on the par-4 15th hole, then added a 2 on the par-5 third hole to etch his name in golf history.
“It was a pretty wild experience,” Starr said from his home in Jupiter, Florida.
An albatross is so rare that just 139 have been recorded on the PGA Tour since 1983, an average of about three per year by the best players in the world.
Starr was in Las Vegas to help his good friend Ryan Gerard celebrate his first PGA Tour victory five days earlier at the Barracuda Championship in Truckee, California. Their festivities included a round Friday at TPC Summerlin.
“Even though he won a PGA Tour event, I told him he had the second-best week on the course between us,” Starr said jokingly.
The first albatross happened on the 304-yard 15th hole. After Gerard came up short of the green with a 3 wood, Starr decided to hit a driver to the elevated green.
Neither player saw his ball land or go in the hole and expected it to be at the back of the green.
“When I walked up and saw it in the hole, I freaked out a bit,” Starr said.
The pair finished their first nine and thought about stopping there.
“We almost didn’t play the second nine,” Starr said.
But after playing his previous five holes in 6 under, they decided to keep on.
Good decision
Starr says he “smoked a drive” on the 473-yard third hole, leaving him just a wedge into the green.
Gerard joked that holing this shot would be a Mickey Mouse albatross, Starr said, but that’s exactly what he did.
“I saw it in the air, and I just knew,” Starr said. “Ryan was looking at his phone and didn’t see it, but I heard it hit the pin and told him I think it’s in.”
When he found the ball at the bottom of the cup, the friends exploded in celebration.
“Emotions were running pretty high,” Starr said.
Gerard, playing this week at the PGA Tour event in Greensboro, North Carolina, confirmed the details were true. He signed the scorecard as a witness to the round and to history.
“I’m just happy it happened on a real, legitimate course and not some random muni,” Starr said.
Goodbye to pro golf
For Starr, the accomplishment comes just as he is leaving professional golf behind. He played college golf at LaGrange College outside Atlanta and has toiled on the mini-tours for the past 2½ years. That can be a brutal existence for golfers who, even if successful, have expenses in excess of any earnings.
“It just became a little too much,” said Starr, who is putting the clubs away for a job with a private aviation company starting Monday. He said he’ll continue to play and work to regain his amateur status to allow him into some of the bigger events in the Southeast.
His efforts at TPC Summerlin included plenty of luck, Starr admitted, but an enormous amount of skill is involved to get into that position. His hole-in-one on the 15th was the fifth of his career, and he also had a previous albatross in 2018 at the Turtle Creek Club in Tequesta, Florida.
But two in one round is something he’ll never forget. The World Golf Hall of Fame most likely will be calling to get a piece of history from the day into its museum.
“We’ve been talking about it quite a bit,” Starr said since returning home from Las Vegas. “I think that will continue for quite some time.”
Greg Robertson can be reached at grobertson@reviewjournal.com.
