GOLF : Donna Duke Takes Title of ‘the Queen of Aces’

The average golfer is content to reach the green from the tee on a par-three hole. Expectations are considerably higher for Donna Duke.

“The last thing I want to hear when I’m on the tee is for someone to say, ‘Let’s see a hole in one,’ ” Duke said. “Then, I try too hard.”

Duke, 60, a retired civil-service worker, has created her own pressure cooker. She has recorded 28 holes in one and reportedly has witnesses to verify each of them.

You don’t believe it? Neither, perhaps, would Ripley. The odds of any golfer making a hole in one are 8,000 to 1.

But people who have seen her play say she has an uncanny knack of hitting the ball close to the hole, if not in.

Duke is aware that there will always be skeptics.

“If I had one or 28, I would run into that,” she said. “But I get nothing out of this, nothing financially. What good would it do me to say that I’ve done it when I hadn’t? I always have three to four golfers with me.”

Duke was preparing to go on vacation to the island of Maui in Hawaii to play golf with friends. What else?

She is just grateful that she is even playing.

Duke had a mastectomy in September of 1989 and then underwent six months of chemotherapy.

“You just keep your fingers crossed and hope (the cancer) doesn’t recur,” Duke said.

She recorded her last hole in one on June 15, 1989, at the Los Robles course in Thousand Oaks. She used a six-iron from 131 yards.

That gave her 28 aces, beginning with her first one Sept. 22, 1984, at the Ojai Valley Inn & Country Club.

But that’s only the official count by her reckoning and those of witnesses.

“I have lived in Leisure Village, a retirement center in Camarillo, since April of 1987,” she said. “We have a par-three, 18-hole course. Since I have been here, I’ve had 10 (aces) and three or four this year. But they don’t count because it isn’t a regulation course.”

Some people, low handicap golfers, play all of their lives and never get a hole in one.

“It’s unreal,” she said. “I just like to hit the ball in front of the cup and roll it in. That’s the key for me.”

Duke, who plays to a 10 handicap, isn’t choosy as to where she gets her aces, having recorded them at several courses, among them Camarillo Springs, River Ridge in Oxnard, Saticoy Regional and the Clark course at the Point Mugu Naval Air Base.

Even though she claimed 14 holes in one--with witnesses--in the calendar year of 1985, three on successive days, she wasn’t credited with a record.

Her 12th, ostensibly breaking the record at a 274-yard hole at Point Mugu while cutting a dogleg, wasn’t acknowledged by Golf Digest, which monitors records.

Golf Digest Editor Lois Hains said it couldn’t be accepted because no one actually saw the ball fall into the cup.

Duke and her three playing partners explained that she got that ace on a hole with an elevated green and that no one could possibly have seen the ball disappear into the cup.

“Maybe they think I have a trained pet gopher who is picking the ball up with his teeth and dropping it in the hole,” Duke said at the time.