By Gary Curreri
Although Lighthouse Point’s Linda Kenoyer doesn’t have an official handicap, she at least shares something in common with her professional golfer daughter Stefanie.
The 64-year-old Kenoyer recently picked up her firstever hole-in-one when she hit a 9-iron, 95 yards to ace the Par-3 hole at the Winding Hills Country Club in Montgomery, NY.
“It was pretty crazy,” said Kenoyer, who was visiting family in New York and was able to get away for a round of golf. “I’m not a great golfer, and Stefanie has three hole-in-ones, so, for me to do it, it was such an amazingly fluke thing.”
Kenoyer, who says she plays to about a 22 handicap, called it the “right club for the right distance” on the executive course.
“I kind of heard it and we walked up to look and see and I said, ‘I think it is in the hole. How did that happen?” said Kenoyer, who was playing with her husband Steve. “I hit it a little left of the hole and it kind of banked down. It rolled right in. I heard it hit the pin. It was exciting. We found the ball in the cup.”
“I didn’t expect myself to get one,” Kenoyer added. “It was a shock really. I hit the ball very cleanly. It was a good shot. It was a perfect connection. I was pretty lucky to get it to bank correctly and fall into the cup. It takes quite a lot of luck and some skill because it has to be the right club and the right distance.”
Stefanie, 24, a professional golfer on the Symetra Tour, and two-time participant on the Golf Channel’s Big Break television series during 2013, started playing golf 12 years ago and took lessons from Bob Loring, the head golf professional at the Pompano Beach Golf Course.
Linda Kenoyer also started playing golf at the same time and took a few lessons from Loring. She found it ironic that her daughter got her first hole-in-one at age 14, while she was 50-years older when she got her first. Stefanie had three career hole-in-ones.
“I’ve had very, very few lessons, just a couple of lessons,” Linda Kenoyer said. “I’ve gone out with Stefanie when she has been around and she’s given me some tips. I just never really had the time to take the lessons.”
Following her round, she sent a text to her daughter.
“It said, ‘you won’t believe this. I just got my first hole-in-one,’” the elder Kenoyer said. “She was all excited. I think all of my friends were more excited than I was. I guess it is a big deal in a lot of ways because you don’t know if you are going to get another one. That could be it for my whole life.”
She was surprised to find out a short time later that Stefanie made a post on her Facebook page congratulating her mother on her milestone.
“That was very nice,” Linda Kenoyer said. “It was very, very touching when she said how proud she was of me. It was very sweet and she wrote a nice post about it. It is so funny because we are always so proud of our kids and the things that they do, and we try and be supportive, so here it was in reverse. I thought it was a very thoughtful thing she did.”
