A monthly medal at the picturesque Ceredigion club turned into a once-in-a-lifetime occasion as Simon Edwards and Jamie Bethell both holed in one on the same morning – a feat the statisticians suggest shouldn’t really happen at all.
Every club golfer carries the same quiet ambition somewhere in the back of their bag: one day, on one hole, the ball will leave the clubface, fly true, take a kind bounce and disappear into the cup. For most, that day never arrives. At Penrhos Park Golf Club on Sunday 26 April, it arrived twice – in the same competition, on the same morning, before the bacon rolls had cooled in the clubhouse.
A morning that rewrote the odds
The occasion was the first monthly medal of the new golf season, traditionally a chance for members to knock the rust off and post an early marker for the year ahead. Instead, it became one of the most memorable mornings in the recent history of Penrhos Park’s championship course.
Simon ‘Grox’ Edwards struck first in the record books, holing his tee shot at the par-three 11th. Not long after, fellow member Jamie Bethell answered in kind, finding the bottom of the cup from the tee at the 5th. Two members. Two aces. One competition. One stunned clubhouse.
Word travelled fast around Penrhos Park, as it always does when something extraordinary happens between the ropes. By the time the final groups had walked off the 18th, the conversation had shifted from medal scores and stableford points to a single, slightly disbelieving question: Did that really just happen?
The numbers behind the miracle
To understand quite how unusual the morning was, it helps to look at the cold statistics. Research into amateur golf suggests that the average club player makes a hole-in-one roughly once every 12,500 par-three tee shots. That figure already feels daunting, but it becomes more sobering when you translate it into rounds played.
A typical club member playing 20 full rounds a year, with four par threes per round, hits around 80 short-hole tee shots in a season. At that rate, a single hole-in-one would be expected to arrive – on average – once every 150 years or so. Which is to say: for the overwhelming majority of golfers, never.
The probability of two members of the same club, in the same monthly medal, both posting an ace, climbs into territory the bookmakers don’t usually bother quoting. It’s the kind of statistical curiosity that has rounds of drinks being bought before anyone has fully done the maths.
A club moment to savour
What makes the story so quintessentially “club golf” is that this wasn’t a televised event, a major championship moment or a tour pro reading a yardage book to the millimetre. It was two amateur golfers, playing the course they know best, on a Sunday morning in late April, doing something the statisticians say shouldn’t have happened.
Penrhos Park, a parkland layout in the heart of Ceredigion, has long been a popular fixture on the west Wales golf scene. The course is known for its friendly atmosphere and a membership that takes its monthly medals seriously without ever losing sight of why they took up the game in the first place. Mornings like this are exactly why.
The club’s traditions around holes-in-one – like most clubs, there are a few – were tested in style on Sunday. Two names on the honours board. Two trips around the bar. And a Sunday morning that will be retold, with the embellishments growing slightly each time, for years to come.
Memory of a season
For Simon Edwards and Jamie Bethell, the rest of the 2026 season can take whatever shape it likes. Birdies will come and go, three-putts will be cursed, and the weather will, this being Wales, do whatever it pleases. But neither will forget the morning they walked into the clubhouse as the men who beat odds of well over a million to one.
For everyone else at Penrhos Park, it’s a reminder of why we keep teeing it up. The shot of a lifetime is always one swing away – and occasionally, just occasionally, it arrives in pairs.
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