What are the odds of sinking a hole in one?
Long, right?
In fact, the majority of golfers will never get one, regardless of how many lessons taken or how many holes played.
It’s why making an “ace in the hole” is so exciting, although the tradition of buying drinks for your playing group – if not everyone in the clubhouse – can get expensive.
(The origin of that tradition, by the way, is vague. I’m most inclined to suspect that clubhouses promoted it to drive up bar tabs and may have formalized it to discourage golfers from making false claims.)
In any case, several insurers offer hole-in-one coverage as part of liability policies that also cover golfers whose errant balls might strike another player.
These bundled policies will cover several hundred dollars in drinks for hole-in-one celebrations.
Organizers of golf tournaments also buy hole-in-one coverage so that they can afford attention-grabbing prizes as a way to market their events. The coverage eliminates the risk of having to pay for a car or big-dollar prize if someone makes a hole-in-one during the event.
Either way, hole-in-one coverage is worth every premium penny you might spend on it.
After all, with it, you get to celebrate and buy drinks for all. Without it, you face the truly sad prospect of having to slink away and hoping the clubhouse never finds out.
By the way, the odds of an amateur golfer getting a hole-in-one on an arbitrary par-3 hole are about 1 in 12,500.
T. Scott Kennedy is the President and COO of CCIG.