A senior’s miraculous hole-in-one won her a new car, and her reaction was priceless.
Mary Ann Wakfield, 84, was plucked from the crowd at a basketball game at the University of Mississippi over the weekend. She was handed a golf club and given the chance to putt for a brand-new 2020 Nissan Altima.
To get the keys to her new wheels, donated by a local dealership, Wakfield had to nail a seemingly impossible 28-metre putt all the way across the basketball court.
In video footage of the promotional segment of the Ole, Miss., men’s basketball game, Wakfield holds the golf club and eyes the ball. A man with a microphone points to the hole and says: “Let’s see what she’s got.”
Much to the crowd’s delight, she did it, and even she couldn’t believe it.
She takes a gentle swing and the golf ball rolls perfectly down the court and right into the hole. The camera pans back to Wakfield’s face, her jaw dropped in shock. The crowd erupts in surprised cheers.
“I still can’t believe it,” she told KTRE-TV. “I’ve seen the video several times and every time I look to see if it went in the hole.”
Wakfield started learning to golf after she retired, but said she wasn’t much of a putter. As such, she had no strategy approaching this high-stakes competition.
“I really didn’t have a strategy. Fortunately, I was calm … I asked the young man, the announcer, ‘Can I place the ball?’ and he said, ‘No, sorry, you have to putt it from where we place it,'” she continued.
“I walked up to the ball, and it was exactly in line with that hole, but it didn’t comfort me much. I’m a poor putter,” she said. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Hit it lightly, hit it lightly.’ So I followed through and no one could’ve been more amazed than me.”
Once the ball hit centre court, she wasn’t able to even see where it was going. It was only when the crowd started cheering that she knew she won.
“I talked to one man at the game and he said he’d been there four years,” she said. “No one had ever made it or come close to making it.”
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