The Hole Story by Craig DeVrieze

There are holes-in-one, and then there are aces on the signature hole at Whistling Straits Golf Course in Kohler, Wis.

East Moline’s Bob Larsen scored the latter Aug. 21, sailing an 8-iron 163 yards and into the cup at the seventh hole of a golf course that recently was ranked as the third best in the world among courses constructed in the last 50 years.

The Wisconsin course was so ranked in the most recent edition of Golf Magazine. It was host to the PGA Championship in 2004 and is due to reprise that role next year.

Larsen is looking forward to watching next August.

“I can sit there and say “I had a hole-in-one. Why can’t you?” he said.

Larsen played the course with fellow Quad-Citians Todd Raufeisen, Jeff Tomachek and Bruce Wessling.

He shot an 89.

“I was excited about that, too,” he said. “It’s a pretty tough golf course.”

– Golf Magazine, by the way, turned 50 this year and the September edition identified many of what its staff deemed “The Absolute Greatest” items in golf over the last half-century.

Included among five honored living caddies was Moline’s Tony Navarro.

– A panel the magazine put together selected Jack Nicklaus over Tiger Woods as the greatest player in the history of the game, a beyond-the-last-50 years list that includes Old Tom Morris, Bobby Jones and Harry Vardon.

The top five, in order: Nicklaus, Woods, Jones, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead.

— Maybe it is because it is being played in Illinois. Maybe it’s because Michelle Wie is there. Maybe it is because I got to look into Natalie Gulbis’ dreamy eyes earlier this month. But I’m into the Solheim Cup, an event that highlights the best American players in the women’s game by pitting them in Ryder-style battle with a group of Europeans.

It’s too bad there is no LPGA equivilent of the Presidents Cup. What chance would you give the U.S. squad against an assemblage of top Korean-born players?

Today, we Quad-Citians mourn along with Ed Fiori.

What had been his — and the Quad-Cities’ — own personal slice of Tiger Woods history now has a co-owner.

Until Y.E. Yang outgunned the incompable Woods in Sunday’s final round of the PGA Championship in Chaska, Minn., Fiori’s 1996 Quad-City Classic victory at Oakwood Country Club held the distinction of being the only time Woods had taken a solo lead into a Sunday final round and not come out on top.

Yang’s rally from a shot behind to a three-shot win ended Woods’ run of 36 straight front-running successes, dating back to 1996

That is the seldom-mentioned aspect of Tiger’s incredible credentials as the best closer sports has known. We knew he was 47-for-50 when leading or tied entering a final round. We knew he had won 14 straight majors when tied or leading on Sunday morning.

But 36 straight with a lead of a stroke or more often went unremarked.

But it is remarkable. Consider: Since 1980, 54-hole leaders or co-leaders have won less than 50 percent of the tournaments staged on the PGA Tour.

When a 20-year-old Woods, then playing in his third event as a pro, stepped to the first tee at Oakwood Country Club on Sept. 15, 1996, Quad-Citians hoped their hometown would score an enduring place in history as the home to Woods’ first pro win.

Fiori burst that bubble by holding steady while Woods, the tourney’s leader since Friday afternoon, endured a quadruple bogey at the fourth hole and then four-putted the easy seventh.

(”It was quad city in Quad-City,” wrote then A.P. golf writer Ron Sirak, one of a dozen national golf writers who left the Presidents Cup in Washington, D.C.,that morning and flew tto the Q-C to chronicle history in the making.)

History didn’t happen, though. Steady Eddie “The Grip” Fiori’s closing 67 bested Woods’ by five shots that day. Tiger tied for a deflating fifth.

But who knew then that that ‘96 Sunday at Oakwood still would hold a place in Tiger’s personal history for 12-plus years.

It did. Until Sunday, when Y.E. Yang joined The Grip in the rare class of Tiger tamers.

Rest assured, that will remain a very exclusive club in the years to come.