Defying odds with a pair of aces

When he was a New York City police officer, Bill Brino had to be prepared for anything and he did see plenty. Still, all of his years at the 13th and 15th Precincts, patrolling Bellevue Hospital and working on the detective squad couldn't keep him from being utterly amazed at what he experienced a few weeks ago.

Brino, 69, of Cold Spring Harbor, made two holes-in-one in one round during a golf trip to Ohio.

"He was just flabbergasted," said his cousin Paul Lombardi, who was riding in the cart with Brino at Ironwood Golf Course in Wauseon.

He had good reason. Odds on aces are nebulous, but Golf Digest has estimated that making two in one round is a 9,222,500-to-1 shot -- somewhere between getting struck by lightning and winning a state mega lottery.

A computer analyst at the property management firm where Brino works took into account Brino's age and the fact that he generally shoots in the 90s, and came up with an estimate closer to 67 million to 1.

"It's astronomical," said Steve Feder, head pro at Indian Island Country Club in Riverhead, one of the public courses where Brino plays. "I don't know anyone else who has done it."

Brino was overjoyed with just one. He has been playing golf for nearly 40 years and never had one before that visit with Paul and his brother Michael to stay with Gary O'Neill, their childhood friend from Queens. O'Neill lives near Toledo and invited his old golf buddies out to see the U.S. Senior Open at Inverness.

At first, Brino didn't believe that his 152-yard 3-iron on the third hole went in. When he saw the Tommy Armour ball in the cup, he immediately called his wife, his daughter and his 92-year-old father, Anthony, in Ridge.

"I've been lucky enough to play a lot of golf with my father. When we lived in Queens, we'd come out and play at Middle Island, Spring Lake and Pine Hills. We must have gone to Pinehurst 25 years in a row," Brino said.

At the turn, Brino sheepishly reported the ace to the pro shop, embarrassed about having used a 3-iron. "I can't swing hard. I've got a bad back," he said. "I decided to just swing easy. And I'm going to play that way from now on."

Using that strategy, he took a smooth swing with a 3-wood on the 164-yard 15th hole and sure enough, someone said, "That might have gone in." And they found another Tommy Armour ball in the cup (matching a feat by Long Islander Cindy Levine in Florida two years ago).

Brino carries both souvenirs in his golf bag, and he has quite a story about two of his 88 strokes that day. He and his buddies did go to the Senior Open the next day, and one of them told Nick Price and Bernhard Langer about it.

"They looked at us like we were kidding," Paul Lombardi said, adding that in his job with East Coast Sod in New Jersey, he delivers grass to high-end, U.S. Open-caliber courses. He has told Brino's story at least 50 times. "No one had heard of anything like it, let alone seen it. I saw it."

You'd think Brino's luck is impeccable. You'd be wrong. When he got back to his cousin's house in Whitestone, he discovered that a storm had caused a tree to topple onto the hood and trunk of his car. He just shrugged it off. "The next day," he said, "I went up to Yorktown Heights to play golf."