Two aces ... and he's only 11!

Erik Boland

May 24, 2007

Kyle Brey is 11 years old and has been playing golf since he was 4.

Not much newsworthy there.

He's a good player for his age, shooting in the low- to mid-80's for a typical 18-hole round.

Not bad, but nothing out of the ordinary there, either.

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On April 22 Brey aced the 100-yard third hole at Sumpwams Creek, an executive par-3 course in Babylon, using a 9-iron.

Ho-hum.

While the 4-11, 75-pound Brey might seem a tad young, juniors across the nation get hole-in-ones all the time.

(The Orange County Register did a story in 2001 on 3-year-old Jake Paine acing a 66-yard hole on a Lake Forest, Cal. practice course. Paine is thought to be the youngest hole-in-one club member, but who really knows for sure with these things).

No, where it gets interesting is that on May 10, Brey did it again, this time using an 8-iron on the 112-yard second hole at Sumpwams.

That's two aces in 18 days.

"I was just shocked that I got another one," Brey, who attends Northside Elementary School in Farmingdale, said Monday afternoon at Bethpage State Park. "Some people don't ever get one."

On the second ace, Brey was playing with his father, Alan, and 14-year-old brother, Kurt.

"I was just like jumping up and down," Kyle said.

Kurt, a freshman at Farmingdale High School, is a pretty good player in his own right, occupying the No. 2 spot on the Dalers' golf team. He has yet to get a hole-in-one and, naturally, had some words of encouragement upon witnessing his younger brother score a second ace in less than three weeks.

"I think I said, 'I hate you,' " Kurt said Monday, laughing.

Alan Brey, after the April 22 ace, had emphasized to his youngest son the importance of treasuring the moment. This, after all, was a once-in-a-lifetime event and for most golfers, a never-in-a-lifetime event. Alan Brey, who has been playing more than 30 years, falls in the latter category.

"I kept saying to him, you may never get another one the rest of your life. This may be it," Alan said. "Then it happens again."

Dr. Frances Scheid, a Ph.D. and a retired chairman of the math department at Boston University, has been calculating various hole-in-one odds for years for Golf Digest. His most recent calculations, from September of 2005, showed the odds of an ace on a 150-yard hole for the average player to be 80,000 to 1. The mathematician did several other calculations, among them the odds of two average players in the same foursome acing the same hole (17 million to 1) and a low-handicap golfer making two aces in the same round (67 million to 1). One number he didn't crunch, however, was the odds of a player making two hole-in-ones within a month.

Have to leave that one to speculation.

Matt Lowe, a friend Brey's at Northside, established his own odds. "I told him when I got the first hole-in-one, and then the other day I was like 'Matt, I got another hole-in-one,' " Brey said.